The first woman to become Fiocruz president, a role she has filled since 2017, Nísia Trindade Lima will also be the first female Minister of Health, starting in January 2023. President elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made the announcement in Brasilia last Thursday (December 12).
“There is much that needs to happen in each ministry. Each comrade is in charge of assembling his/her team. It’s important that these teams include the most competent people, those most committed to our project, and those who participated in this victory, which was not just PT [the Labors’ Party], but many other parties as well”, said Lula. “I hope everybody has something to gain, but our priority is to take care of the poorest people, of the working people, of those in need”.
Together with other researchers, ministers and former ministers, Lima was part of the Health Technical Group in the transition government. With a degree in Social Sciences and a doctorate in Sociology, Nísia Trindade Lima has an intellectual legacy that is reference in the field of Brazilian social thought, history of sciences and public health. She has been a Fiocruz researcher since 1987 and was also director of Casa de Oswaldo Cruz (1998-2005), a Fiocruz unit, and vice-president of Teaching, Information and Communication for Fiocruz (2011-2016).
As Fiocruz president, Lima led the foundation’s actions in the fight against the pandemic, such as the creation of a new Hospital Center in the Manguinhos campus, the bump in the national capacity to manufacture diagnostic kits and process test results, the promotion of initiatives for vulnerable populations, the creation of the Covid-19 Observatory and of Fiocruz’s Genomic Surveillance Network, and the inauguration of the Covid-19 Bio Bank (BC19-Fiocruz). During her tenure, Fiocruz became a reference for the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Americas when it comes to Covid-19 diagnosis.
In the field of Covid-19 vaccines, Lima coordinated Fiocruz’s technology order agreement. With the conclusion of the technology transfer from AstraZeneca, Fiocruz became Brazil’s first institution to manufacture a 100% national Covid-19 vaccine. The Foundation has already supplied the Ministry of Health with more than 200 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines and has been selected by PAHO/WHO as a regional center for mRNA vaccines, still under development.
A trademark of her trajectory in the institution has been interdisciplinary work in international cooperation agreements. She coordinates the Zika Network of Social Sciences, part of the Zika Alliance Network (2018); she was a member of the WHO Global Action Plan work group in 2018, of the WHO advisory group for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda (2019), among others. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she also participated in several transnational cooperation forums and was co-president of the Directing Group of Economic Recovery, one of the WHO Research Groups for Covid-19 Recovery.
In December 2020, she was elected a member of the Brazilian Science Academy in the Social Sciences category. In September 2021, she became an independent member of the Council for Coalition of Innovations in Preparation for Pandemics (Cepi) and has been granted several awards over the years as acknowledgement of her work.