"Health Judicialization in the Federal Supreme Court: Public Reason and the use of scientific evidence and social determinants in the judgment of lawsuits on vaccination against Covid-19".
health judicialization; Covid-19; Brazilian Federal Court of Justice; precedents; scientific evidence; social determinants of health.
This dissertation approaches the phenomenon of the judicialization of health and its object of study is the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court. More precisely, it seeks to find out whether the Court, in judgments regarding vaccination against Covid-19, adhered to its precedents set in the records of Extraordinary Appeals numbers 855.178/SE, 657.718/MG and 566.741/RN, with recognized general repercussion, in which, in short, the judges decided on the need for the Judiciary, when considering demands related to the right to health, to pay deference to technical and administrative instances, as well as to the scientific evidence linked to each case. From a context of health emergency inaugurated by the pandemic caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, the research analyzes judicial processes that, filed before the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court between October and December 2020, in the context of concentrated control of constitutionality, aimed at the supply of a pharmacological innovation still under development and without the competent approval before the Brazilian sanitary surveillance. Thus, revolving around the country's factual, political and socioeconomic contexts, as well as studying the concept of public reason coined by John Rawls, it was found that the Court was able to remain faithful to its own jurisprudence when, in the Arguments of Noncompliance with Fundamental Precept 754/DF, 756/DF and 770/DF and in the Actions of Declaration of Unconstitutionality 6,586/DF and 6,587/DF, maintained respect for what was decided by the technical and administrative bodies in the health area and, in opposition to a behavior considered “denialist” by the federal government, decided in a coherent manner and in line with the social and scientific evidence presented to it. As a result, it was seen that, between an activist stance and self-restraint, the Court acted to mediate conflicts and promote dialogue between powers, monitor and supervise the planning and execution of measures concerning the Covid-19 pandemic and foment a campaign of immunization based on technical and scientific criteria, as a way of giving concreteness to the constitutional right to health.