[ad_1]
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Navigating complex waterways to reach remote communities in the Brazilian Amazon is just the first challenge for Waldir Bittencourt, a nurse immunizing indigenous and riparian peoples against COVID-19. Once there, he faced something he hadn’t anticipated: fear of the vaccine.
“It’s a recent phenomenon among indigenous peoples, due to the polarization surrounding the vaccine,” said Bittencourt, 32, who during his eight-year career has been involved in campaigns against tuberculosis, diphtheria and tetanus.
Medical professionals like Bittencourt deploy to remote areas of northern Brazil, often traveling for hours on small planes and boats. Most of the jungle communities have only basic medical facilities unable to treat people with COVID-19. This makes vaccination all the more urgent in order to curb the outbreak of cases.
Brazil has had nearly 235,000 deaths, just behind the United States, according to a count from Johns Hopkins University. In a survey last month by pollster Datafolha, 17% of people said they did not intend to get any of the vaccines approved in Brazil. This is higher in the northern and mid-western regions, which are grouped by Datafolha, and lower in the richer regions of the south and southeast.
Health care workers, experts and anthropologists say the rejection or fear of the vaccine is in part driven by the doubts repeatedly sown by President Jair Bolsonaro over its effectiveness. Bolsonaro, who himself was infected with COVID-19 last year, has said he is not planning to get the vaccine and insists others should not do so unless they are wish.
He initially refused to authorize the purchase of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine and said on Facebook that Brazilians would never be anyone’s “guinea pig”. He also refused the Pfizer vaccine, citing a clause that protected the American company from any potential liability. He joked that there would be no recourse if women grew beards, men’s voices got high or people turned into alligators.
Its anti-science message has caught on in remote communities.
“This anti-vaccine movement did not come from them. It’s brought by some missionaries, social media, fake news, ”said anthropologist Aparecida Maria Neiva Vilaça, who works with indigenous communities in the northern state of Rondonia.
These communities have had better access to technology and the Internet in recent years, but information often arrives in “very distorted” ways, Bittencourt said by phone from Macapa, capital of Amapa state.
In the Purure community, inside the Tumucumaque Mountains National Park, some locals asked Bittencourt if they could get an injection with the vaccine imported from India, as they believed that meant it had been produced by indigenous peoples. In Brazil, the word “Indian” is still widely used to refer to indigenous peoples.
In other villages, some feared that they would be used as test subjects for wider vaccination campaigns among non-indigenous people, while others feared the devil would enter their bodies.
Although most eventually decided to get the vaccine, Bittencourt and Vilaça said they had never seen such reluctance among indigenous peoples.
Some evangelical leaders have been another source of misinformation, they said. Evangelicals broadly supported Bolsonaro during the 2018 presidential campaign, and some pastors in remote communities helped spread his message against the COVID-19 vaccine.
Audio messages circulating on the WhatsApp messaging app told of pastors claiming they could cure those infected. In one message, a man remembers a pastor informing him that the vaccine was not needed, because God could heal him.
Vilaça, who teaches social anthropology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro when not in the north, said the rest of Brazilian society is no different when it comes to disinformation.
“A large part of the population is also only informed by WhatsApp, social media and does not have access to newspaper information,” she said.
Nurse Luciana Dias da Costa has also encountered difficulties in the state of Amazonas. Vaccination is particularly critical in the state, where a wave of infections has overwhelmed the already fragile public health system in the capital Manaus. This has forced a nationwide mobilization to deliver oxygen to patients who have difficulty breathing or transport hundreds of them to better equipped facilities in other states.
“We want to vaccinate everyone, but like I said, some accept and some don’t,” said da Costa, 46, during a boat interview to the community of Sao Joao do Tupe, in 25 kilometers west of Manaus. Many seniors told him that they feared the effects of the vaccine they had heard about on the radio.
Official government data shows a fatality rate of 224 per 100,000 in Amazonas state – double the national average. Some health experts believe that a variant of the coronavirus that is more contagious and less vulnerable to certain treatments has caused a dramatic increase in hospitalizations and deaths.
Dr Ethel Maciel, an epidemiologist who has advised the government on its COVID-19 vaccination program, said remote communities in the Amazon are a priority, given their lack of health infrastructure and great distances that people have to travel to get proper medical care in Manaus.
“With an acute infectious disease like COVID-19, which tends to get worse very quickly, by the time these people make the trip, sometimes the person is already dead,” she said.
In Amazonas, Jane Barbosa of Albuquerque, 71, said she was initially skeptical about the vaccine.
“We doubt. What is the best? Which one will I take? Which one came to us here in the Amazon? ” she asked.
Eventually, however, de Albuquerque agreed to let a nurse insert a needle into his left arm. “Health comes first,” she says.
[ad_2]
Source link