Law as an instrument for implementing public health policy during epidemics and pandemics Roberto Santos da Silva, Renata Salgado Leme

Abstract

The 2002 epidemic (SARS) and the 2019 pandemic (SARS-CoV-2), both of which began in China and were caused by variants of the coronavirus, resulted in several treatment and prevention protocols, with quarantine being one of the most widely used methods to prevent the rapid spread and collapse of the national health system. The State used legal norms for social control, aiming to encourage social distancing and enable the suspension of activities considered non-essential, establishing fines in the event of non-compliance with orders, and even ordering arrests. The protected legal asset was “public health”, and in view of the risk of aggression to this legal asset, the State established public protection policies that ranged from the use of legal norms to the action of the justice system (judiciary and police) to punish offenders with administrative, civil and criminal sanctions. With this, the State positioned itself socially, reinforcing the need for citizens to adhere to the guidelines (hygiene protocols, social distancing, vaccination, etc.) of the policy implemented in the context of the emergency caused by SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil. This article aims to analyze the role of Law as an institutional practice for structuring public health policy, in the search for adherence to established protocols and the impact of its contribution to the policy of reducing the effects of the pandemic. Factors such as the relationship between the biological (Covid-19) and the social, as well as the provision of the SUS, to receive this input of demands, are also points of reflection. The research is exploratory in nature, based on a legislative and doctrinal bibliographic survey.