Jair Bolsonaro trusts Covid vaccines and Brazil falls behind

Photographer: Dado Galdieri / Bloomberg

Around the world are presidents and prime ministers skarrel to get precious bottles of Covid vaccine to protect citizens and gain political favor. Not Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

The president, who has downplayed the pandemic from the start, refuses to be vaccinated, pooh-poohs are needed to negotiate with drug companies and says the country will wait until prices fall before buying syringes or needles. On Thursday, he said Brazilians do not even want vaccines – information he obtained by voting people in the street and on the beach.

‘It’s nonsense, it’s experimental vaccines without scientific evidence. You can not force it on people, “said Bolsonaro. “We have to be responsible, we can not say with the crowd that we have to rush.”

His dismissal quickly leaves Brazil behind in the global race to immunize against a virus that killed nearly 1.9 million people, 200,000 of them in Brazil. While neighboring Argentina, Chile and Mexico have started deploying shots, Brazil does not even have a clear timeline for doing so. Companies were slow to submit requests to the local regulator, which has ten days to clear the shots before they can be distributed. The talks with Pfizer Inc. lasts for two months.

Vaccinations begin in Latin America, where Covid hit hardest

Like US President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro nods to his base in times of crisis. At the height of the pandemic, he plunged into crowds and embraced supporters – to the dismay of local officials trying to impose restrictions. As criticism grew, Bolsonaro determined that the economic toll was more important than the disease, calling those involved ‘sissies’ and insisting that chloroquine – unproven as a treatment – was the solution.

Bolsonaro, who got infected himself and recovered, instituted a $ 60 billion cash-distribution program that drove poverty and raised its approval rating to a record.

“Bolsonaro is a denial,” said Deysi Cioccari, a political scientist at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo, when explaining his approach. “He does not share the same set of basic facts as others, and has a basis that is completely hypnotized.”

With almost 8 million cases, Brazil is one of the worst hit. It is expected to be better vaccinated, given its deep experience through its once-announced public health system known as SUS. It has 35,000 outposts and, despite the pandemic in 2020, has reached 90% of the planned flu shots.

The country also has two reputable institutions that have entered into agreements to produce local vaccines – Instituto Butantan and Fiocruz, together with Sinovac and AstraZeneca, respectively. And despite what the president has said, 73% of the public say they want to be vaccinated.

Both settings submitted requests for use of vaccines on Friday with the regulator.

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The lack of action by the central government has left the 27 states of Brazil to provide themselves with limited resources to search the world for transactions. Richer states can jump ahead, exacerbating the inequalities that the pandemic reveals.

Complaints about the act by the federal government prompted Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello to take action. The third man to has held the post since the crisis – a military general with no medical background – he vehemently rejected the criticism this week, saying that Brazil had secured 354 million doses of vaccines and that all countries would be treated equally. The government, which bet on the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot, has agreed to include China’s Sinovac facilitates the plans despite Bolsonaro’s public objections to them ‘because of their origin’.

But Pazuello also spread misinformation. At a news conference on Thursday, he said that the vaccine against AstraZeneca requires only one shot, and that the second dose is only to increase the effectiveness to 100%, from 70%, which is not correct.

He also said that there are no vaccines available for a population of 210 million on the open market – acknowledgein fact, Brazil failed to find them early – and so the country would have to make its own.

The government is negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on the well-being of all Brazilians, the Ministry of Health said in an email. In addition, there is still no conclusion on whether one dose of vaccine is sufficient to maintain long-term immunity and that it will follow according to the prescriptions of the companies that manufacture the shots.

The presidency said it would not comment further than Bolsonaro’s webcast and the minister’s press conference.