With a background working on complicated logistical challenges in the military, he was named in February to lead the national vaccination task force.
Standing 6 feet, 3 inches, the admiral made it a point to wear only his combat uniform in his many public and television appearances as he sought to essentially draft the nation into one collective pandemic-fighting force.
“The first thing is to make this thing a war,” Gouveia e Melo said in an interview, recalling how he approached the job. “I use not only the language of war, but military language.”
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In a submarine, the admiral said, you are in a slow ship trying to catch faster ships.
“You have to position yourself and be smart about how to do it,” he said, “and seize the opportunity when it arrives.”
In July, Gouveia e Melo seized such an opportunity.
Protesters were blocking the entrance to a vaccination center in Lisbon, so he donned his combat uniform and went there with no security detail.
“I went through these crazy people,” he said. “They started to call me ‘murderer, murderer.’”
As the television cameras rolled, the admiral calmly stood his ground.
“I said the murderer is the virus,” Gouveia e Melo recalled. The true killer, he said, would be people who live like it is the 13th century without any notion of reality.
“I attempted to communicate in a very true and honest way about all doubts and problems,” he said.
But not everybody welcomed his approach.
“We don’t really have a culture of questioning authorities,” said Laura Sanches, a clinical psychologist who has criticized Portugal’s mass vaccination rollout as too militaristic and called for it to exclude younger people.
“And the way he always presented himself in camouflage army suits — as if he was fighting a war — together with the language used by the media and the politicians, has contributed to a feeling of fear that also makes us more prone to obey and not question,” she said.
Still, the public messaging campaign — including an aggressive television and media blitz — made steady progress.
“In the beginning, we had some 40% who were unsure,” Gouveia e Melo said. Now, according to polls, he said, only 2.2% do not want the vaccine.