Zema and the right vomit inconsistency about vaccination – 02/10/2024 – Reinaldo José Lopes

It would be fascinating, if it weren’t for a public health tragedy, to observe the complete incoherence and ignorance of anti-vaccination politics in Brazil.

In recent days, on the one hand, we have seen the shoe-wearing Bolsonarista Romeu Zema and the paleolithic parliamentarians Nikolas Ferreira and Cleitinho come together to celebrate the fact that schools in Minas Gerais will not require vaccination certificates to enroll their students. Zema went on to say that children first have to go to school to learn science and only then decide whether they want to be vaccinated or not. The most charitable thing that can be said about the trio is that the Generals once offered better sons from their mountains for the arena of national politics.

What Zema knows about immunology and epidemiology is more or less at the same level as the “terribly evangelical” Nikolas Ferreira’s knowledge about biblical exegesis (the precocious deputy even used a mysterious phrase from Jesus about swords to defend firearms for everyone in Brazil ).

To keep the fanatical base of Bolsonarism alive, the governor of Minas Gerais leaves aside the fact that vaccines, in general, were designed to prevent infectious diseases in early childhood, which can lead to death or permanent damage before the child is born. age to go to school.

And, even if the nonsense uttered was restricted only to vaccines against Covid-19, he forgets the fact that young children – again, well before school age – are more vulnerable than older ones to the pandemic virus.

This, then, is one side of the lethal coin. The other is the co-option of the term “genocidal” by the Tupiniquim far right when referring to the delay in the wider use of dengue vaccines in Brazil. In the best “accuses them of what you are” style, this is what they are trying to paste on the Lula government.

The dengue situation is undoubtedly worrying, and the lack of a strategic approach that had the ambition and means to come as close as possible to eradicating the problem is a failure of multiple decades and multiple governments. That said, however, it doesn’t make any sense to compare dengue fever with the disastrous response to the challenges of Covid-19.

To begin with, there is the order of magnitude of the problem. The mortality caused by dengue, even in its worst years, is on the order of one hundredth of that caused by the pandemic in Brazil.

This is partly why there are still no vaccines against dengue for everyone, either of the (few) already commercially available, or in the case of the immunization developed by the Butantan Institute, currently in the final stage of development. There is also the fact that dengue fever continues to be mostly a disease of poor tropical countries, something that the current climate emergency may transform in the coming decades. Both factors mean that the money invested to develop and distribute these vaccines is not remotely comparable to that used in the case of the pandemic, unfortunately.

And there is yet another question. We know the subtypes of the dengue virus quite well, which is why mass vaccination is, paradoxically, more complicated than against Covid-19, not less.

People who are infected with one subtype of dengue and then come into contact with another may be at increased risk of more severe forms of the disease because of a poorly understood interaction between existing antibodies and the new subtype of the virus.

One of the existing vaccines is capable of causing this same phenomenon in certain conditions, including. Apparently, the most recent ones do not pose this risk. But it is still too early to know to what extent they will be able to provide balanced protection against the four subtypes of the virus.

In short, vaccination is not a mess, even though nowadays people can secure a few million votes by saying that it is.

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