The 20 presenters who occupied the Deputies’ auditorium for almost seven hours were very clear about it. Also the hundred people who filled the place to listen to them, and the many who remained outside. Obviously, the list of those who were aware that a “historical event” was taking place was headed by Marilú Quiroz, the PRO deputy who pushed for the meeting. Would Martín Menem, the president of the Chamber who gave him the approval, think the same? It is a mystery: why until now the Riojan decided to remain silent. What is clear is that never in Argentine democratic history had the anti-science and anti-vaccine current, in the midst of the outbreak of diseases that were thought to be extinct such as measles, had had a voice in such a relevant place.
And it was not the only novelty. The star presence of the day – one whose main reason was to propose the repeal of the mandatory vaccination law – was Chinda Brandolino. She is a doctor famous not only for her tirades against vaccines but for the sympathies she has shown with the “Fuhrer” (as she calls Adolf Hitler) and with some of the most famous Nazis on the continent. The management of La Libertad Avanza provides for everything.
Obscurantism
To size Brandolino’s resume we must start with the following: she stood out at an event in which statements were heard such as that vaccines were part of a plan organized by “Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Soros, members of a secret satanic sect, the Illuminati, that runs the planet” to reduce the world population (Federico Nazar, former professor of bioethics), that they had been designed from “the beyond” to “turn us all into human robots” (Lucía Langer, pediatric medicine), or that were comparable to the experiments carried out by the Nazi Joseph Mengele (Andrés González Balcarce, doctor).
Brandolino is a doctor from Mendoza who is almost a celebrity within the world of Argentine Catholic nationalism. Married since she was 18, with eight children, she made a name for herself in this universe – especially giving talks at events organized by Cabildo magazine, a publication that oscillated between extreme positions and Nazism – from the beginning of the century, until she had her big hit in 2018. In that year, the first of the uncovering of the green wave, Brandolino went from anonymity to the general public to become “the woman of the light blue wave.”
This is how her fans began to nickname her – on the networks she had more than 100 thousand followers, in groups created by them – after she was one of the strongest voices against the “executioners law”, as she called the legalization of abortion. In truth, not only for that: there the doctor began to mix her personal position against this measure with conspiratorial statements such as that “aborted fetuses are used to make triple viral vaccines” or that during this practice “the little one opens his mouth and cries in silence.” At the closing of the event in Congress he went one step further: there he maintained that the decriminalization of abortion was the “Pandora’s box” that “opened the way to the thousands of evils that happen today.”
However, his stardom would come during the pandemic confinement in 2020. In a note made to him on Channel 9 by the model Nicole Neumann, Brandolino brought out his best machinations: the vaccines “contain a metallic solution” (almost a preview of what would happen later in Deputies, where they paraded a gardener without a shirt who swore that after being vaccinated against Covid he began to magnetize metal elements with his body) or that “they modify the human genome.” That interview went viral and earned him the rejection of a large part of the medical and scientific community.
Extremes
However, Brandolino is not only famous for her outlandish pseudoscientific opinions. Also for its political side. A regular columnist for TLV1 – a channel managed by Juan Manuel Soajes Pinto, an extreme denier who proposed “putting a rope around the gays’ necks with a stone and throwing them into evil” -, she was a pre-candidate for President for UNITE, the space that had former carapintada Juan José Gómez Centurión and Amalia Granata in its ranks and which today is part of La Libertad Avanza. After his candidacy fell, he called to vote for Alejandro Biondini and in 2023 he ended up on Santiago Cúneo’s list.
Their positions are extreme. In 2015 he participated in a tribute to Salvador Borrego, Mexican writer and author of “World Defeat” (a book that posits that the good guys lost in the Second War), perhaps the most famous contemporary Nazi on the continent. There Brandolino called Hitler “Fuhrer.” Today, with the support of the ruling party, it and the anti-science take place in Congress.
