Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Antônio Fausto Neto 204 the relations between medical-sanitary appeals and political discourse. According to its origin, which articulates asymmetric foundations, and using digital media practices, which provide direct contact between the president and the population, the political discourse systematically operates against mediational logics. It does so by expressing strategies of a discourse that combats the isolation of society, whose main enunciator is the President of the Republic himself. He uses strategies that appeal to a combat discourse, not necessarily to the virus, but to the medical-sanitary guide- lines themselves, through slogans whose modalities aim to disqualify the ones of the medical-sanitary field. In these con - ditions, while the virus circulates, placing Brazil in the second or third place in the number of deaths, in the fifth month of its occurrence, in another scenario of production and circulation of messages, discursive battles occur, produced in other contexts, on the margin of the coronavirus circulatory ascendancy curve. 2. Clashes: pro-isolation discourses The coronavirus takes a journey that affects and trans- forms the country’s geography, its routines, and the way of being of the social organization. It is transformed into the object of di- verse social institutions that intertwine around different points of view, such as those that emphasize the ways of fighting it. In terms of health guidance, we highlight the discourse supported by institutions that take care of policies in this area, such as the Ministry of Health itself, that, in convergence with WHO guidelines, supported throughout most of this period a thesis in defense of policies of implementation for the isolation of the population as a possibility to contain the transmission of the virus. Such guidelines also followed methodological pro- cedures that have inspired the practices of “campaigning” that have guided, over the years, health education and communica- tion policies, in the face of the occurrence of virus appearance phenomena, etcetera, in different contexts. The activity imple- mented by the Ministry of Health was carried out for some time, during the first months of fighting the virus, in an operational