The lethal legacy of Bolsonarism is exporting anti-vaccine ideas – 09/09/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

A recent report by beloved colleague Ana Bottallo should be mandatory reading for anyone who still has the nerve to minimize the damage caused by Bolsonarism in the Brazilian public debate. Data from an opinion poll indicate that a significant portion of Bolsonaro’s voters reject not only vaccines against Covid-19 but also immunizations that Brazilian children have received for decades.

If you haven’t read Ana’s text yet (which I strongly recommend you do), here are some of the numbers. Only 38.7% of the former president’s voters agree with childhood vaccination against Covid (the number among those who voted for the current president is 76.4%). While 92.1% of those who voted for Lula agree with the idea of ​​vaccinating children against measles and infantile paralysis, the number drops to 83.6% in the case of those who wanted to elect Bolsonaro.

This data seems to fully prove the maxim that nothing is more dangerous than an imbecile (or crazy person, or scoundrel) with initiative and access to WhatsApp. Congratulations, Bolsonaro supporters: in just a few years of the pandemic, you managed to create from scratch, “ex nihilo”, a mass anti-vaccination movement – ​​in a country where this had not existed since the Vaccine Revolt, in the distant Old Republic. For those who preached a return to the past, you hit the nail on the head, taking Brazil back more than a century.

It is necessary to insist on this point. In the period before the 2020-2023 pandemic, the rejection of childhood vaccination was, in our country, a matter for half a dozen people with money in their pockets and weak ideas in their heads, trapped in an illusory conception of “natural health” .

Vaccination coverage –that is, the proportion of children with up-to-date vaccination cards– has been falling slowly, it is true. But that was the result of a combination of logistical shortcomings and a certain sloppiness on the part of some younger parents.

In recent years, however, the disgrace of the Sars-CoV-2 virus has been compounded by a tireless campaign of defamation of vaccines, which came from the mouth of a subject of a cult of personality and was replicated by a large part of his followers inside and outside. of the political class. Campaign, incidentally, that did not stop – just look at the spurious repetition of rumors about the supposed terrible effects of vaccines against Covid-19.

It’s good to remember, for those who still pretend to be unaware, that this anti-vaccination crusade did not come into the world with the “made in Brazil” stamp. Bolsonarism, to which we cannot attribute the crime of having a brain of its own, simply copied and pasted a litany that was already ready from the global far right. It’s ironic when you think about how scared these people are in the face of “globalism”.

There are those who insist on not understanding that a vaccine is, par excellence, a type of collective protection. The possibility that 15% or 20% of Brazilian parents fail to vaccinate their children against measles or infantile paralysis is disastrous because each fewer child within the protection shield is equivalent to removing, in addition, one or two shields from those who were vaccinated.

This is especially true in the case of measles, for example, which is much more transmissible than Covid and can only be truly stopped with very high vaccination coverage. In fact, measles can kill – just as Covid killed thousands of Brazilian children, especially babies.

The evil that men do lives on even after they leave power and the world. If someday Bolsonaro and his henchmen end up in jail for trickery with gifts from Arabia, they will still be in profit. Its most inhuman crimes run the risk of continuing to claim victims among the weakest of us for a long time to come.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.