Brazil and (the lack of) vaccination
“The place where the modern meets the archaic and the most retrograde ideas in society get scientific varnish" - I would like to have kinder words to describe my country. I am Brazilian, and in the midst one of the greatest pandemics on record, that description has never made more sense.
We are at the end of May 2021, at a singular moment in the pandemic, where a considerable part of the world is being vaccinated or on the way to a large-scale vaccination. While it is possible to notice this worldwide trend of searching and researching vaccine-related solutions to the crisis we are in, it is curious to observe the enormous green and yellow vehicle going in the opposite direction of this highway.
While underdeveloped countries are left behind in the vaccination process due to the lack of investment and financial resources and the precariousness of disorganized health system structures. Brazil — actually the Brazilian Federal Government — under command of President Bolsonaro, also known as “The Trump of the Tropics”, occupies the distinct category of countries with sufficient financial and scientific resources that continue to deny the existence, mortality, seriousness and dimensions of COVID-19 long enough for its attitudes to be described as criminal. When the vaccine race started at full speed, Bolsonaro’s Government chose to glorify the Chloroquine tale — medicine indicated for the treatment of malaria, which the World Health Organization and the international scientific community contraindicated for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 — and herd immunity. These, my dear readers, are blatantly visible aspects of the archaic Brazilian modernity to which I was referring.
In August 2020, Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, contacted the Brazilian government to negotiate the sale of 70 million doses of its vaccine and the Butantan Institute — internationally renowned for the vaccines and serums production and nowadays also known for the song Bum Bum Tam Tam by MC Fioti — offered the delivery of 60 million doses of its vaccine until the fourth quarter of 2020. Both offers have not been answered, making us reach the mark of 450 thousand lost lives to a virus that already has a vaccine. Between the intentional and calamitous inability of the government to politically articulate the vaccines' purchase and the insistence on completely absurd unscientific theories of "miraculous" or "precocious" treatments, Brazil is increasingly isolating itself as the world's largest, most promising, island.
The indignation, revolt and anguish of more than half of the nation (approximately 100 million people) does not seem to be enough to alert the Bolsonaro Government of the endless spiral of misinformation and chaos the country is in. As long as the president has his “playpen 1” — the name given to the space in which supporters stand daily in front of the Palácio da Alvorada ( Brazil's White House) — cheering for him, the country's position on the global stage does not seem to matter.
As if all this wasn't enough, Brazil continues to develop a straight up weird diplomatic strategy with important economic allies, such as China, a country that is exporting commodities from Brazil in order to produce new doses of the vaccine.
The Brazilian population's lack of mass vaccination leads to a disastrous conjuncture and the worsening of a previously established economic and social crisis , removing Brazil from any respectable position of influence in the world.
The not-so-silent international push for mass immunization, defended by the scientific community, gains an individualistic character in the Bolsonaro government. In addition to the catastrophic context of the Brazilian government's lack of guidance for a mass vaccination, we still have to witness wealthy groups trying to cut in the vaccination line through draft laws that favor the purchase of large quantities of vaccines by entrepreneurs. The combination of these internal characteristics and Brazilian public policies fighting for the pandemic is gradually making Brazil a red zone of contagion and spread of the virus. In a global context, places with a scanty vaccination vaccine distribution due to political mismanagement become a risk to global health. A collective effort by richer countries, such as the United States, is essential for an equitable vaccine worldwide distribution. Therefore, for everyone to be safe, everyone must be vaccinated.
The most curious thing to think about the Brazilian situation in contrast to the world scenario is that Brazil has a universal and free health care system (Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS) with capillarity large enough to vaccinate the entire population! It is worth remembering that SUS has already been considered an international model for its ability to deal with viral outbreaks in the past, such as the H1N1 epidemic, in which 88 million people were vaccinated over a 3-month period.
With these characteristics, Brazil could be an iconic showcase for a mass vaccination, setting examples in management, organization and effectiveness for a large-scale, local and global, health care project. Unfortunately, in the current political situation this is not the position occupied by Brazil and its health care system. Between the strong denial by the federal government regarding the pandemic and a grand vaccine shortage , Brazil is entering history for having a conservative political government that prioritizes individual wishes and desires, scientific denialism, the dissemination of fake news and, consequently, widening social inequality while decreasing its relevance and influence on a global scale.