Graça Freitas

Maria da Graça Gregório de Freitas (born 26 August 1957) is a Portuguese physician and public health specialist who was the Director-General of Health and inherently the chief medical officer and leading spokesperson on matters of public health in Portugal, between 2018 and 2023. She has work published in the fields of vaccination, prevention and control of communicable diseases, public health emergencies, and health communication.

Before her appointment to the Directorate-General, she served as Deputy Director-General under her predecessor Francisco George, and coordinated several public health programmes, most notably, since 1996, the Portuguese National Vaccination Programme. which included both Portuguese and international personalities.

Early life and education She was born in 1957, in Nova Lisboa (present-day Huambo), By her own account, the figure of the health officer (delegado de saúde), which was very important in that territory, might have drawn her to public health; Initially, she had considered a career in agriculture or silviculture, but her parents discouraged it due to it being uncommon to see women in agricultural engineering at the time; in her teenage years, she had also considered architecture.

She enrolled in Medicine at the University of Luanda in 1974, the year of the Carnation Revolution. Angola achieved independence from Portugal the following year through the Alvor Agreement; in 1975, she departed for Portugal

In 1996, at the invitation of Jorge Torgal, This was before the first evidence of human-to-human contagion outside China emerged, and before the World Health Organization started to acknowledge these dynamics of transmission in late January and early February. The first recorded cases of COVID-19 in the country were confirmed on 2 March. She would later say she was aware of the seriousness of the situation, but admitted not to have envisioned it to take such dramatic sanitary, economic, and social proportions.

Freitas herself tested positive for COVID-19 on 1 December 2020, displaying only mild symptoms of the disease. In July 2021, it was reported that she was quarantining at home following a high-risk contact on 9 July, even after having been fully vaccinated, in strict compliance to the guidelines issued by the Directorate-General of Health.

Awards and honours For her accomplishments as coordinator of the National Vaccination Programme, Graça Freitas was awarded with the Ministry of Health Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Grade, in 2005. In 1985, she was similarly the recipient of a Commendation due to her work for Lisbon Regional Health Administration's Office for Epidemiology and Studies in containing the last diphtheria outbreak in the country.

Personal life She is married, and has granddaughters.

A smoker for over 20 years, she quit smoking in 2000 with the help of varenicline, motivated by Francisco George and by the increasing difficulty in climbing the steep incline of Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques to get to the offices of the Directorate-General of Health.

She practices plant collecting as a hobby and grows camellias and her favourite flower, orchids. She also enjoys travelling to visit botanical gardens. An inveterate reader, her favourite book is V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, which was read to her at the age of four. Her favourite song is Estrela do Mar, by Jorge Palma.

She sleeps from 1 a.m. to half-past 5 a.m. The stress of overseeing all matters of public health in Portugal during the COVID-19 pandemic, which she described as "running a marathon on the Everest", made her lose 5 to 6 kilograms in the first month after the start of the outbreak in the country.