My first 15 minutes of Brazilian fame were born of a freak accident.
While on vacation last year with my family at a Brazilian beach town, I was rummaging around in the trunk of my Volkswagen Gol, a tiny hatchback manufactured by Volkswagen Brazil until 2022, when the support strut that held up the trunk door snapped. The full weight came crashing down on my head, splitting it open and sending me covered in blood to Hugo Miranda Paraty Municipal Hospital.
Brazil’s public health care system kicked in and gave me the works: ambulance ride, stitches, X-rays, cranial imaging, antibiotics and pain relievers — and an idea for a newspaper story. I was The Washington Post bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro at the time.
While members of the U.S. Congress were debating cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies — projected to sever millions of people from health insurance — the Brazilian public health care system had just provided me with extensive and competent treatment at a critical moment at no charge whatsoever. No one asked to see any insurance information. No one even requested the local equivalent of my social security number.
Once my story hit Brazilian Instagram, it went supernova. Strangers were coming up to me on the streets. I got messages from sources all over Brazil. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appeared enamored of a tale of an American receiving free Brazilian health care. He told and retold it, adding in a few embellishments.
“He said, ‘How am I going to pay? If this was the United States, an ambulance would cost me $10,000! How am I going to pay?’” Lula said in August 2025, quoting me inaccurately.
With a bit more than a week until the second round of the Brazilian presidential election — pitting Lula against first-round victor Flávio Bolsonaro — images of my bandaged countenance are once more trending in Brazil.
One post this week about my hospital visit drew 117,000 likes. Another one scored 74,000, and another 54,000.
The resurgence of the story, no coincidence in timing, has highlighted both the enduring political resonance of public health care in Brazil — consistently ranked among the most important issues to voters — and the growing electoral might of the Brazilian influencer class, who are remaking how politics are done in Latin America’s largest nation.
Democracies across the world have been unsettled by social media personalities. But their impact has been particularly pronounced in Brazil, according to a 2025 report by the Reuters Institute for Journalism, which found that “news creators and influencers play a much bigger role in Brazil overall than most other countries.”
Many of the influencers are themselves running for office. In 2024, with few qualifications besides strong opinions and a large presence online, Pablo Marçal garnered more than 1.7 million votes in the race for São Paulo mayor.
“In Brazil, there has been the rise of a certain type of influencer who commodifies opinions, perspectives and national political matters,” said Rita Figueiras, a political communication researcher at the Catholic Portuguese University in Lisbon. “They’ve risen in part because the market is just so big, and there’s an opportunity to make it industrial.”
Now I’m being taken for a second run down the factory line.
It began earlier this year with Lula, who has sought to draw a contrast between his policies and those of conservatives who he has accused of trying to weaken public health programs. The debate is an old one in Brazil, which runs the world’s largest public health care system, guaranteeing medical services to each of some 214 million citizens and 2 million foreign-born residents.
Conservatives have long criticized it as wasteful, mismanaged and overrun. Former president Jair Bolsonaro — Flávio Bolsonaro’s father — signed a 2020 decree that opened a path toward privatizing parts of it before immediately backing down amid a wave of criticism.
Appearing to try to exploit that opening, and cast himself as the defender of public health care, Lula brought me up again in July and then again in September, asserting that the poor get better treatment in Brazil than in the U.S..
“We didn’t even ask if he was American or not,” Lula said. “He was a human being who needed medical care. And that’s how the [public health care system] works.”
The Lula campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on his use of my story.
From there, a Lula-aligned federal congressman running for a seat in the Brazilian senate published a story about me to his 1.9 million followers. Then arrived the hive — Lula boosters, gossip bloggers and influencers, all writing about my hospital visit as if it had just happened, imposing beauty filters on my appearance and pumping out inaccurate quotes attributed to me.
“No asked me for my credit card or insurance; they just attended me,” the most prominent inaccurate quote reads.
The spread of the story reflected a pattern that has been on repeat in recent weeks, said Maria do Socorro Sousa Braga, a professor of social science at the Federal University of São Carlos. After losing in the first round of the election and with Bolsonaro holding a narrow lead in polls ahead of the second round, Lula is trying to reassert himself on social media, she said.
“We’re being bombarded 24 hours a day by these influencers,” she said. “And in many cases, it’s in favor of Lula.”
It is a strategic shift for the left in a country where social media is often dominated by the right. Now Lula and leftists are trying to pinpoint the most resonant political messages, she said, to show what they say Brazilians will lose if the right wins.
And few matters, she said, are more important in Brazil than public health care.
“It starts with the president, then the influencers, going back and forth between one another until social media amplifies the messages, and it reaches an extraordinary level,” she said.
So my second 15 minutes of Brazilian fame, she said, will in all likelihood extend. At least, until after the election.
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