Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the COVID-19 epidemic acted as an accelerator of social inequalities and structural vulnerability experienced by specific segments of the Brazilian population, particularly, and by countries in the Global South, in general. It presents the effects of the pandemic on “groups at risk”. It evaluates these effects against the moral and justice perspective developed by Dias, namely, the Functionings Approach (FA). This is a perspective that (1) aims to abandon current paradigms that violate basic functionings of individuals who remain at the margins of hegemonic epistemologies, and (2) claims a decolonial paradigm as a way to understand the colonial legacies that are still present in the structuring of social inequalities at global and local levels.