The 18-year-old student Gabrielly Esperança dos Santos receives the first dose of the covid-19 vaccine in São Paulo, Brazil on Monday.CARLA CARNIEL / Reuters
Isabel Andrade, 18, was one of the first to arrive on Saturday at one of the vaccination posts in São Paulo and anxiously awaited her turn. In the background, the carnival groups hired by the City Council sounded to animate the “Virada da Vacina” during the weekend, 34 hours followed by vaccination in which the first dose of the vaccine against covid-19 was administered to almost 500,000 people between 18 and 21 years old. “I have avoided leaving home since the beginning of the pandemic, but now I can dream of having fun on the streets, right? I can't wait! ”, The Brazilian celebrated.
The adherence of young people like Isabel to the vaccination campaign is one of the factors that, according to infectologists, have helped to have the first dose administered to 73% of the adult population in Brazil, according to data from the state departments of Health.
The country has already overtaken the United States (with 71% of the population with the first dose, according to official data), where the anti-vaccine movement has kept young people away from vaccination with arguments ranging from parental prohibition to fallacies about the risk of infertility in women.
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São Paulo is the state with the highest vaccination rate: 66.7% with the first or only dose, and in the capital 98.5% of adults have already received it. The numbers have generated hope and social networks celebrate the way Brazilians join any mass phenomenon. “The anti-vaccine movement runs into an obstacle in Brazil and that is that Brazilians love 1) free things in general, 2) anything that everyone is doing and 3) anything in which they can take a picture of first to post it on the networks ”, describes a Twitter user.
Francisco Ivanildo Oliveira, infectologist at Hospital Emílio Ribas, agrees. “The Brazilian has a predisposition to be vaccinated. Fortunately, although there is a small anti-vaccine group in the country, it seems to be mobilized more by political ideologies than by scientific skepticism ”, he comments. The specialist recalls recent public opinion polls, such as the one carried out by the Datafolha Institute in July, which indicated that 94% of the population wants to be vaccinated against covid-19.
"Young people miss parties a lot, and the vaccination campaign brought together two groups: those who are going to be vaccinated as if they were going to a party and those who do it out of a deep sense of moral duty", considers psychoanalyst Christian Dunker. And remember that Generation Z is characterized by a certain moralism, an adherence to global values that leads them to act in a disciplined way when it comes to doing the right thing. “It is true that we see clandestine parties, people without masks, but there is also a trait of solidarity, especially when talking about the family, when you have vulnerable grandparents, fathers and mothers. This mobilizes young people from all social classes ”, he adds. The psychoanalyst also recalls that, in a context where face-to-face classes are suspended,collapsing universities and other factors, adherence to vaccination is a "response to the lack of foresight and negligence felt" by the actions of the public powers, especially the federal government.
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For Xico Sá, columnist for EL PAÍS, "party hope" contributes to the advancement of vaccination in the country.
“It is the effect of the party that is announced.
I've seen guys 18 and over making plans to get vaccinated and go out on New Years Eve with friends.
With this package, the vaccination campaign works.
The promise of happiness, Brazilian hedonism kills denial ”, he affirms.
He adds that currently in Brazil “the belief in the vaccine, in science, in happiness without the need for clandestine parties” is being reinforced, which take place while the country still adds 900 daily deaths from covid-19, according to the moving average calculated by the Ministry of Health.
Oliveira believes that the publicity around the vaccine against the disease has been done well, in the sense that it also serves to "liberate" people from confinement, but he fears that it has been done in an exaggerated way. This Monday, the governor of São Paulo, João Doria, celebrated the Day of Hope for having managed to vaccinate almost the entire adult population of the State and announced that on Wednesday the vaccination of young people between 12 and 17 years old should begin, first the who have disabilities or comorbidities, pregnant women and women in labor. "You have to modulate this enthusiasm, without depressing people, but I also have an 18-year-old daughter and I had to remind her that she still can't celebrate it, only after the second dose," says the infectologist. And remember that,Although scientific studies show that the efficacy of vaccines tends to be higher in the young population, Brazil still runs the risk of experiencing new waves, as happened in Israel and the United Kingdom, mainly due to the delta variant of the coronavirus, whose transmissibility is older.
Another warning factor is the heterogeneity in the distribution of vaccine doses between Brazilian states and cities: in Salvador (Bahia), for example, vaccination was suspended on Sunday. On August 11, the Ministry of Health had 9.5 million doses in stock, while the governments of Pará and Rio de Janeiro complained that the distribution of vaccines to their states was delayed. “Brazil is still in a hurry. A large part of our population still does not have the first dose and even less the complete regimen ”, commented, at the time, Renato Kfouri, director of the Brazilian Society of Immunizations. According to data from the Ministry of Health, only 28.68% of the population over 18 years of age is fully vaccinated in Brazil, that is, with the two doses or with the single dose.
For this reason, Francisco de Oliveira recalls that, in order to celebrate something, it is necessary to "rescue those who stayed on the road", with campaigns to attract people who did not appear at the vaccination points to get the second dose or not even the first, mainly among the older priority groups.
Xico Sá remembers the journalist Carlos Heitor Cony (Rio de Janeiro, 1926-2018), who wrote about his “historical envy” of the Cariocas who lived through the Carnival of 1919, the first after the Spanish flu crisis: after months of coffins parade through the streets, the town threw a cathartic survival party.
"What is happening now is an expectation of that celebration," he says.
And, although specialists warn that you can not go back to the parties yet, it is possible to feed this hope of party euphoria.
As Christian Dunker says, "the vaccine is the way to freedom."
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