Leaving aside the silly rhetoric he used to sell his policy, his approach seems pragmatic, almost fatalistic, in that Brazil simply has limited resources to control a large scale pandemic and infections were going to be massive no matter what. Therefore he went with the better of two bad options. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit. AMLO in Mexico was also heavily criticized internationally for refusing to completely shut down the country, now cases in Mexico are falling while having no restrictions at all on internatonal travel in and out of the country.
It's not fair to compare this with Trump's do-nothing approach as some people have, because the US does have the resources to contain a pandemic, but his administration simply chose not to act, and ignored the recommendations of their own experts.