The Minister of Health, Nísia Trindade, claims that all COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be both effective and safe, and that COVID-19 is a vaccine-preventable disease.
On October 31, Brazil’s Ministry of Health announced that as of next year COVID-19 vaccines will be included in the national vaccine schedule for young children. According to a press release from the Ministry, the vaccination of children aged 6 months to 5 years will be “prioritised” alongside “groups at high risk of developing severe forms of the disease,” including the elderly, immunocompromised, pregnant and postpartum women, people with permanent disabilities and indigenous people.
Three doses of the vaccine will be administered to millions of Brazilian babies, toddlers and young children, with an interval of 8 weeks between the 1st and 2nd dose, and one of 4 months between the 2nd and 3rd. There will be just options on offer. After scrapping its recommendations for viral vector vaccines (AstraZeneca and Janssen) in April, the Health Ministry currently approves (as far as I can tell) Pfizer-BioNtech’s Comirnaty and Comirnaty bivalent, Moderna’s Spikevax bivalent, and the Chinese-produced Coronavac.
“It is an important change, in line with the World Health Organization [WHO], in which the vaccine against COVID-19 now joins our National Immunisation Program,” said the Ministry’s Health and Environment Surveillance Secretary, Ethel Maciel. “The vaccine is now recommended in the children’s calendar. For all children… in Brazil, aged between 6 months and 5 years, the vaccine becomes mandatory in the vaccination calendar.”
In taking this measure, the government is not merely approving the use of COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as six months old (that was already done some time ago); it is, as Maciel says, effectively mandating it. And those at the sharpest end of the mandate will be the children of Brazil’s poorest families, since one of the main requirements for families to qualify for Brazil’s recently reintroduced “Bolsa Familia” welfare program is that all children must be up to date with all immunisations provided for in the National Immunisation Program of the Ministry of Health. That now includes the COVID-19 vaccine.
Brazil is already one of the most vaccinated countries in Latin America, with almost 90% of the population receiving at least one dose and 82%, two by January 2023. But relatively few young children are getting the jab. In August, a study showed that only 11% of children aged 6 months to 5 years had received at least two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. Speaking to Merco Press, researcher Cristiano Boccolini lamented that only 3% of babies aged 6 months to 2 years had been treated with the drugs, layingthe blame on delays in vaccine purchases, “fake news” that children do not suffer severe consequences from contracting COVID-19, and widespread public fears about the vaccine’s lack of safety and effectiveness.
According to Brazil’s Minister of Health, Nísia Trindade, who seemingly inhabits an entirely different universe to the rest of us, all of the vaccines have proven to be not only safe but effective by Brazil’s health regulatory agency, Anvisa. Not only that, she says, but COVID-19 is a vaccine-preventable disease.
This is a staggering claim to make, particularly for a national health minister, at this stage in the pandemic. The vaccines have been in widespread use for almost three years now, with 70% of the world population receiving at least one dose, according to Our World in Data. Yet the virus continues to circulate, spread and evolve. Moreover, a number of recent high-quality studies, including one from the Cleveland clinic, suggest that repeated boosting with these vaccines leads to negative efficacy, meaning that the protection provided quickly wanes after a brief surge, leaving patients net more vulnerable to the virus.
This correlates with the IM Doc’s meticulously and extensively maintained records of patient outcomes, which suggest that recent vaccination by the new vaccines is correlated with a new infection not long after. In recent correspondence with Yves, IM Doc said this outcome had “become so frequent that it is leading to outrage among patients who got a booster and then in fairly short order got Covid, and to patient rejection of advertising and MD pressure to get a Covid booster (although per below, the latter is waning).”
The problem is not just that the vaccines are not very effective at preventing transmission or infection; it is that they are not nearly as safe as they have been advertised.
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Nick Corbishley 