RIP, David Miranda, former GP turned Brazilian politician and social activist.

[SolaceSoul]

Not a fan at all of his husband (now widow) Glenn Greenwald, but David seemed like a lovely person, who definitely was a rare garoto / beach boy success story. So much accomplished and such promise left, and far too young to leave this Earth — not to mention such an awful way to go. Those poor children that he leaves behind. 

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Obituaries

David Miranda, Brazilian gay rights activist and legislator, dies at 37

 

He assisted his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in disseminating information from classified U.S. documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden David Miranda at his office in Brasília in 2019. (Sergio Lima/AFP/Getty Images)

By Fred A. Bernstein May 10, 2023 at 2:47 p.m. CT

David Miranda, a Brazilian gay rights activist and former lawmaker who assisted his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in disseminating information from classified U.S. documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, died May 9 at a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. He was 37. Greenwald announced the death, which occurred a day before Mr. Miranda’s 38th birthday.

After being hospitalized with a severe gastrointestinal infection in August, Mr. Miranda spent nine months in intensive care, where he battled additional infections but occasionally rallied, according to Greenwald. No immediate cause of death was reported.

The son of a prostitute, Mr. Miranda was raised by a neighbor in a desperately poor Rio neighborhood. He rose to prominence as a groundbreaking gay politician and fierce opponent of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022. Mr. Miranda ranked among Time magazine’s 100 “next generation leaders” in 2019 because of his outspokenness on behalf of Brazil’s poorest and most-marginalized communities.

Mr. Miranda, who met Greenwald in 2005 on Rio’s Ipanema Beach, entered politics in 2016, when he became, by all accounts, the first openly gay man elected to Rio’s city council. Two years later, he ran for the federal legislature with the Socialism and Liberty Party, known by its Portuguese initials PSOL. Mr. Miranda lost the 2018 election but gained a seat the following year after lawmaker Jean Wyllys, another openly gay member of PSOL, left the country following death threats. Mr. Miranda was elected to fill his seat. “Obviously, I’m afraid for my life or what can happen to my family,” Mr. Miranda said in a radio interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2019, “but in moments like this you have to be brave. People need a voice.”

Before entering politics, Mr. Miranda gained international attention while carrying computer files related to documents leaked by Snowden, a computer intelligence consultant whose employer worked with the National Security Agency. In 2013, Snowden had released a trove of classified material to Greenwald and Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker living in Germany. Among the disclosures were details on surveillance by the NSA and other agencies. Several months later, Mr. Miranda was enlisted by Greenwald to ferry a thumb drive from Poitras back to Brazil. During a stopover at London’s Heathrow Airport, Mr. Miranda was detained under Britain’s anti-terrorism law and held for nine hours.

“I was sure I was going away to Guantánamo forever,” he later said. But he made it home to Rio and sued the British government, claiming it violated his rights as a journalist. A British tribunal ruled in 2014 that Mr. Miranda’s detention was lawful although it was “an indirect interference with press freedom.” (Snowden did not return to the United States, fearing arrest, and was granted Russian citizenship in 2022.) “Journalism is not a crime,” Greenwald said after his husband’s detention, “and it’s not terrorism.”

Mr. Miranda and Greenwald met in 2005 when the latter, then a lawyer in Manhattan, traveled to Brazil for a two-month vacation. On the beach, Mr. Miranda was playing volleyball and accidentally knocked over Greenwald’s drink. He apologized profusely, in Portuguese. Mr. Miranda and Greenwald went out to dinner that night and began living together less than a week later. Their mutual attraction, Greenwald later told the New York Times, was like “two asteroids colliding,” and they soon married. “I didn’t speak much English,” Mr. Miranda told Out magazine in 2011, “and he only knew a few words of Portuguese, but we communicated everything important. When you meet the right person, you know it.”

To stay in Brazil with Mr. Miranda, Greenwald had to stop practicing law. He threw himself into blogging, first with Salon and then for the Guardian. He developed a following writing about the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their effect on civil liberties back home. Greenwald’s pieces attracted the attention of Snowden years before the leaks.

In 2014, The Washington Post and the Guardian were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series of stories that exposed the NSA’s global surveillance programs. The lead journalists on the project — The Post’s Barton Gellman and Greenwald for the Guardian — based their articles on Snowden’s disclosures. “Of everyone who had a hand in the 2013 revelations of global mass surveillance, my dear friend David Miranda was perhaps the most righteous — and pure,” Snowden tweeted after hearing of Mr. Miranda’s death. Snowden wrote that Mr. Miranda “never faltered” during his questioning by British authorities.

Life on the streets David Michael dos Santos Miranda was born on May 10, 1985, to a prostitute in Jacarezinho, one of Rio’s most impoverished districts. He never knew his father, and his mother died when he was 5. Mr. Miranda was raised by a neighbor, but he went off on his own at 13. To get by, he shined shoes and cleaned buildings and sometimes scrounged from trash bins for food. Later, with Greenwald’s encouragement, Mr. Miranda graduated in 2014 with a marketing degree from a school in Rio.

Mr. Miranda’s involvement in the Snowden leaks inspired him to enter politics, first by mounting an unsuccessful appeal to Brazilian authorities to grant Snowden asylum. A year after his election in Rio, he was joined on the city council by Marielle Franco, a Black woman with a female partner and a child. She became a mentor and “a mother figure,” Mr. Miranda said. Their joint initiatives included a law allowing transgender people to use their preferred names on government documents. “Fighting for the LGBT community,” he said, “is the core of my bones and blood.”

In 2018, while being driven home after giving a speech, Franco was fatally shot. Mr. Miranda told Out magazine that he believed it was a targeted killing. (Two former policemen were later arrested in the crime and are awaiting trial.) “They could have pretended it was a mugging,” Mr. Miranda said, “but they didn’t bother. They wanted to send a message.” Mr. Miranda said being a pallbearer at Franco’s funeral “might have been the hardest moment of my life.”

After Franco’s death, Mr. Miranda, Greenwald and their two adopted children traveled in cars with bulletproof glass. Mr. Miranda canceled some engagements for security reasons.

In the federal legislature, Mr. Miranda led efforts for hate crime laws to protect LGBTQ+ communities. He also worked on investigative projects with Greenwald, who left the Guardian and helped found a news site, the Intercept, in 2014. (Greenwald resigned from the Intercept in 2020.)

Mr. Miranda helped Greenwald with a 2019 story that quoted from hacked cellphone conversations between prosecutors and a judge overseeing a corruption case against former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose jailing cleared the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory. (Da Silva, widely known as Lula, came back to defeat Bolsonaro in 2022 and regain the presidency.)

The bombshell story made Mr. Miranda and Greenwald targets of Bolsonaro, who had already declared himself “a proud homophobe,” and his supporters. In 2020, Greenwald was charged with “cybercrimes” by the Bolsonaro government. The case was later dismissed by a judge who said Greenwald had “instigated” hacking but was protected by press freedoms. In addition to Greenwald, survivors include their sons, João and Jonathan.

In July 2019, the Times reported that Mr. Miranda was living alone and racked by “loneliness and alienation” in the capital, Brasília. He served out his term, however, and planned to run for reelection in 2022. His candidacy was withdrawn in October during his hospitalization. “Fighting for justice is necessary, an obligation,” wrote Mr. Miranda in 2018, “even if it is always risky.

[Riobard]

Sad news.

Sepsis.

Any otherwise healthy gay male with sudden onset acute illness admitted to a Brazil hospital last August should have been properly assessed and given the antiviral Tecovirimat for the Orthopox infection widely circulating among thousands of urban MSM there at the time.

Cue the hyperventilating with accusations of rumour-mongering and specious short-sighted diagnostic formulation from afar. Put a paper bag on it.

All I’m saying is that it would be unfortunate if such treatment would have had its place, presumptively or categorically, but the opportunity possibly missed because the trend was new and standard management practice not yet gaining full traction, not to mention the impediment of denialism and the counterproductive babbling of misguided “activists” regarding stigmatization when the clinical community was already fully engaged and deployed along with hypervigilant sensitivity.

It would have been a first line differential applied by my Infectious Diseases clinical colleagues up in my neck of the woods.

Obviously we are getting the tip of the iceberg, less than the full story known or unknown, and privacy is an important consideration. The central theme is loss and what’s done is done.

[forrestreid]

On 5/12/2023 at 5:48 PM, Riobard said:

Any otherwise healthy gay male with sudden onset acute illness admitted to a Brazil hospital last August should have been properly assessed and given the antiviral Tecovirimat for the Orthopox infection widely circulating among thousands of urban MSM there at the time.

 

 

Sorry, could you clarify if the above mentioned orthopox outbreak is the same as the mpox (aka monkeypox) outbreak from last year, or some other strain?

[Riobard]

56 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

 

Sorry, could you clarify if the above mentioned orthopox outbreak is the same as the mpox (aka monkeypox) outbreak from last year, or some other strain?

Same as the outbreak in our faces last year. Orthopox is the overarching label for the class of virus that includes Monkeypox and Smallpox (aka Variola). Tecovirimat is indicated for expanded orthopox applications, as was the intent of MVA-BN vaccine uptake many of us pursued last year, some older among us having then received broader sequential prophylaxis by virtue of generational product progression.

The term Monkeypox is comparatively tone deaf when misappropriated for stigmatizing, and non-Simian classifications such as rodents are susceptible to infection and potential vectors of transmission. I don’t expect everybody to align with particular labelling. However, it might be easier for some infected folks anywhere to have shared, when pressed, the news of being ill with what the clinician termed as orthopox. 

As anywhere, in Brazil “variola dos macacos” is loaded, for anybody, let alone a married man in the public eye for whom getting backed into a corner is more plausible. 

Interestingly, Brazil to its credit launched early on a preparatory ‘be on safe side’ awareness campaign, paediatric targeted. 

[Riobard]

… But unfortunately late to the party viz vaccination deployment. 

In contrast, ANVISA authorized Tecovirimat early Sept, very quickly based on FDA’s 2018 greenlight. The 2022 USA clinical trial’s protocol re: lag from illness onset to initial dose would be consistent with the window within which an individual’s infection morbidity commenced in August. Again, timing is everything, and this line of narrative is no more than speculative.