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Young people line up in Rio de Janeiro to be vaccinated
Photo: ANDRE COELHO / EPA-EFE
Two Brazilians are standing in a small bar in the east of São Paulo and drinking beer.
There is a news program on television.
The topic: the dramatic corona situation in Germany.
The current numbers are displayed.
One of the men asks in disbelief: "In Germany, really?"
The other replies: "Yes, these lunatics cannot be vaccinated."
The journalist Niklas Franzen observed the scene last Thursday and described it on Twitter.
It stands for the collective head-shaking that reports about the fourth wave in Germany are currently triggering in Brazil, the country that has long been considered the epicenter of the pandemic and a kind of open-air laboratory for new virus variants.
With astonishment, but also horror, one now looks at the chaos in rich, supposedly more rational Germany and asks - like the city magazine Metro, for example: How did this happen?
Conversely, one could ask: How did Brazil get its corona drama under control?
Can Germany learn something from this?
The Paulistas, i.e. the inhabitants of the megacity São Paulo, are proud of their vaccination quota. Advertising banners on the streets identify the city as the »World Capital of Vaccination«. Even in the state of the same name with around 46 million inhabitants, almost all adults are at least once immunized. 95 percent have already received two doses of vaccine.
And it looks the same in most of the other major cities in the country.
A total of 80 percent of adult Brazilians are already fully immunized, and children from the age of twelve have long since received injections.
As a result, the number of corona infections and deaths has fallen sharply.
In the city of Rio de Janeiro, the specially set up Covid department of the city’s Ronaldo Gazolla Hospital was closed again at the beginning of October.
It is no longer needed.
The next carnival should take place again.
The country has saved itself - at least for the time being.
And that despite the fact that the coronavirus could ravage the country for months, more than 600,000 Brazilians lost their lives and terrible scenes took place in front of overcrowded hospitals in cities like Manaus.
Brazil was rightly considered the black sheep of the pandemic fight worldwide.
President Jair Bolsonaro played down the virus from the start.
The right-wing populist later railed against vaccinations, warning that the vaccines could turn you into a crocodile.
For a long time he did not respond to the manufacturers' offers and negligently did not order any vaccinations.
Senators accused him of crimes against humanity because of his corona policy.
The vaccination campaign started accordingly late - but was then all the more successful.
There are several reasons for this: Every citizen is automatically insured and therefore entitled to receive a whole range of vaccinations free of charge.
And Brazil has a well-developed medical infrastructure.
This is one of the reasons why the country is able to vaccinate millions of people within a few days.
There are no complicated procedures for making appointments.
Instead, in the case of the corona vaccination, every age group was invited to public health centers on certain days; the injection was sometimes given in the drive-through procedure or in shopping centers upon presentation of ID.
The vaccines were even brought to remote places, such as indigenous communities in the Amazon, by boat and helicopter.
Most of all, the Brazilians can attribute their success to themselves: Like almost no other population in the world, they trust in vaccinations, including those against Corona. “People really don't care what Bolsonaro says about vaccinations. Even his followers have all been vaccinated, ”says health expert Ligia Bahia from the University of Rio de Janeiro. There are hardly any opponents of vaccination in Brazil; even homeopaths are now pro-vaccination. "Trust in vaccines has a long tradition in Brazil that cannot be undermined despite the catastrophic communication by the president," said Bahia.
She also sees the reasons for this in the past: Many Brazilians would still remember times when there was not enough vaccine.
In the 1970s, for example, many children died of severe forms of tuberculosis or measles.
Vaccination campaigns followed that saved many lives.
Confidence in the public health system grew.
Many Brazilians now had terrible experiences during the Covid pandemic.
Poor people were disproportionately affected by the virus, also because they had to keep earning money.
Some families lost several relatives.
“People have been waiting for this vaccination;
it was longed for, "says Bahia," for the poor it is simply the only way to protect themselves. "
The hunger for social contacts, carefree parties and carnivals, Bahia believes, also played a role.
The middle class saw people in the US or Israel being vaccinated on television and associated vaccination with freedom.
It is a narrative, exactly the opposite of the story of European opponents of vaccination, who associate something like coercion with the vaccine.
"We health experts knew that there was this movement in Germany and in some European countries," says Infectiologist Raquel Stucci from Campinas University, "so the situation didn't really surprise us."
However, the example of Germany clearly shows that a vaccination rate below 85 percent is not sufficient to contain the virus. German politics made mistakes, not only because they signaled to the vaccinated that they were out of danger. Stucci also sees serious failures with the booster vaccinations: "Germany ignored the data that showed that the protection provided by the vaccinations wears off after four to six months," says Stucci. A booster shot after six months at the earliest, as currently planned in Germany, is too late. "The vaccinated population will be exposed to the virus in the meantime," says Stucci.
To avoid a similar scenario, Brazil has already fully planned the booster campaign and started immunizing medical staff and people over 60 for the third time. The booster should be given to all over 18 year olds five months after the second dose. While the Chinese vaccine from Sinopharm and AstraZeneca, among other things, was still used for the basic immunization, boosts are now to take place exclusively with the vaccine from Biontech / Pfizer, which is soon to be manufactured in Brazil.
The pandemic situation is currently easing not only in Brazil, but also in many other Latin American countries.
Although most countries started mass immunization relatively late, many of them are now on par with Europe and the United States.
Many first vaccinated with the Chinese and Russian vaccines because the rich industrialized countries had bought up the other vaccines.
But then they caught up: Argentina is now also producing some vaccines itself under license
and vaccinates toddlers from the age of three. The numbers are so good that the government plans to donate a million cans to Africa and Asia. Booster campaigns have long been running in Uruguay and Chile. Where the vaccination quota is low, in Bolivia, Venezuela or Paraguay, there is simply a lack of economic means to procure the vaccines.
However, many Brazilians can hardly understand that precisely that rich Germany, from which the most sought-after of all vaccinations in Brazil comes, could find itself in such a dramatic situation again.
More than 60,000 new infections daily - these numbers even worry their health experts.
"The circulation of the virus in the population is extremely high," says the infectiologist Stucci, "I'm very worried that a new, German super variant could emerge that will then spread throughout the world."
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