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A last-minute recommendation by the Brazilian Senate Pandemic Panel that Bolsonaro’s health team halt the nation’s drug import programme has been softened.
Instead, the panel has called for a new consultation on the new drug import scheme.
It has also asked the health team to debate whether the national drug-import policy was illegal.
Medical experts said the recommendations were a “collapse”.
Protesters have taken to the streets of Brazil’s largest cities to demand the drug import programme be reversed.
Following a string of deaths linked to drug-resistant superbugs, a large-scale import scheme under which Brazilian medicines could be sold abroad took effect last month.
The funding of the scheme was confirmed by the National Science Congress in September.
‘Alarming’
Senators Guilherme Cordeiro and Cristina Rossa of the ruling PMDB party, who drafted the recommendations, announced the changes on Tuesday.
They said they would like the drug-import plan to be put on hold until a new consultation process was held with representatives of communities and stakeholders, according to Brazil’s Gol TV.
The panel is the final panel to come out of a special Senate commission and is supposed to be independent from the government’s, according to rules set up under the constitution.
President Jair Bolsonaro’s spokeswoman, Sharon Maine said the recommendations came from the two senators “with whom they could least afford to make a spectacle”.
“There have been no discussions or observations to be made on the government’s drug policy,” Ms Maine told Globo TV.
First week meeting
The move comes after the president’s national security adviser, General Hamilton Mourao, also intervened to delay the start of a key ministerial meeting because of the proposal.
After taking office on 1 January, Mr Bolsonaro said he would scrap the 2004 “need to vaccinate” decree that mandated all babies be vaccinated against diphtheria, whooping cough and other diseases.
A vaccination policy which affects over two million children has been blamed for an alarming rise in immunisation rates.
It saw infants and toddlers given long-acting antibiotic drops to ward off side effects and hospitalizations caused by the childhood illness.
The Brazilian congress is due to meet on Thursday as its first day back from recess.
