Contextualizing life expectancy losses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil—authors’ reply

We thank Parente and colleagues1 for their interest in our work and for the opportunity to clarify important aspects of our study, which aimed to describe temporal and geographic patterns in mortality, disability-adjusted life years, and life expectancy in Brazil and its federated units using estimates from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2023.2 At no point did we claim to demonstrate causal effects of specific political decisions, public policies, or societal phenomena. Rather, our interpretation was framed as a contextual discussion of findings observed during a period that has been extensively examined in the scientific literature.