The Senate plenary was transformed into the stage of an anti-vaccine circus Monday 26 February. Requested, chaired and organised by two legislators from the House who gained notoriety in 2021 for their denialist actions during the Senate Parliamentary inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic, this most recent session was billed as a discussion on the inclusion of the paediatric vaccine in the National Immunization Program (PNI), but was limited to the dissemination of misinformation on the topic that is now, unfortunately, immortalised in the annals of the Brazilian National Congress.
It would be comical, were it not a tragic spectacle, with the convex dome of the Senate acting as the circus tent. Soon after invoking God at the opening of the proceedings, the master of ceremonies – that is, president of the session – gave an idea of what would come with what can only be described, gently, as a half-truth. In a jubilant tone – and in a clear attempt to give legitimacy to the event – he stated that the session was approved “unanimously” by Brazilian senators.
However, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. The reality is that request 1046/2023 , was inserted as an “extra-agenda item” literally in the final two minutes of the Senate’s agenda on 28 November 2023, by senator Weverton Rocha (PDT-MA), the second secretary of the House table, who was at that time acting as president of that session. Weverton then opened a symbolic vote, which was over in a matter of seconds (as recorded in the Senate Diary of that date):
Voting on the application.
The senators who approve it remain as they are.
(Break)
Application approved.
The requested session will be scheduled by the General Secretariat of the Bureau.
In other words: there was no vote, so it’s impossible to claim or deny that this “thematic debate session” on the vaccine was “unanimously” approved by the Brazilian senators.
Still, the “show” must go on. In the session introduction, the senator presiding over the work promised a “scientific” and “technical” debate, which would leave “any type of ideology or political issue aside”. A point he would contradict shortly afterwards, with an open criticism of the inclusion of the paediatric COVID-19 vaccine in the PNI, an inclusion he described as “alarming”. Invited to speak about this serious issue? A litany of exclusively anti-vaccine activists, from Brazil and abroad.
Before the guests entered the scene, however, the president of the session set the “stage” with a video featuring testimonies from alleged victims, and family members of alleged victims, of the COVID-19 vaccines in Brazil. Emotional appeal is a common tactic of misinformation spreaders, and exploiting the tragedy of rare real-life cases of deaths and other severe adverse events possibly associated with vaccination is a frequent weapon of anti-vaccine movements.
The reality, however, is that according to the latest epidemiological bulletin on the subject from the Department of Health and Environmental Surveillance of the Ministry of Health, Brazil registered only 50 deaths that had a “causal relationship considered as consistent with vaccination” (level A), out of almost 385 million doses applied throughout the country between January 2021 and March 2023 (with the exception of the state of São Paulo, which was not part of the analysis). None of these deaths with the highest probability of causality with vaccination were children or adolescents, with only one case of death due to myocarditis classified as “B2: Undetermined”, because “investigational data conflict regarding causality”.
The most recent COVID-19 Special Epidemiological Bulletin published by the Ministry of Health, in December 2023, records 211 deaths from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) associated with COVID-19 among Brazilians under the age of 19 last year alone. More than half of those cases (112) were in babies under one year old, and another 59 in children aged between 1 and 11 years. With 3,562 deaths recorded between 2020 and 2022, there were almost 4,000 fatalities from COVID-19 in this age group by the end of 2023.
Furthermore, the same bulletin points to the registration of 2,121 cases of Paediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome (PIMS) associated with the disease throughout the pandemic, causing 144 deaths, with an unspecified number of suspect occurrences still under investigation. It is no coincidence that the number of registered cases of PIMS related to COVID-19 fell drastically once Brazil began to vaccinate children aged 5 to 11, in January 2022, cases fell from 868 in 2021 to 442 in 2022, and just 68 last year.
Among the entire population, there were more than 38.2 million cases of COVID-19, and 708,638 deaths, between February 2020 and December 2023. Again, the numbers show the importance of vaccination: they fell from 424,107 deaths in 2021 – most of them in the first months of the year, when it had barely started – to 74,797 in 2022, and 14,785 last year.
All these numbers confirm that the vaccines against COVID-19 approved and applied in Brazil are safe and effective, and that the possible risks posed by vaccination are much smaller than those suffered by those who decide to face the disease without the protection of the vaccine. The deaths that could perhaps be attributed to the vaccine are no more than 50, while deaths from COVID-19, before vaccines were available, were in the hundreds of thousands – a number that fell drastically after the vaccines were rolled out.
Lack of science, plenty of misinformation
None of these facts and data, however, were presented in the arena – I mean, plenary – of the Senate. Nor, of course, the science and impartiality that was promised by the senator president at the beginning of the session. Overall, what we saw instead was the repetition and recirculation of typical topics of anti-vaccine disinformation in the form of half-truths, unsubstantiated claims, exaggerated statements, and outright lies.
We heard that children do not suffer serious illness and death from COVID-19, and therefore the risks of vaccination do not outweigh the benefits – which the above illustrates is clearly not true. We were advised that vaccines are unnecessary because there is an “early treatment” of COVID-19 in cocktails that include medicines such as chloroquine or ivermectin – a hypothesis completely debunked by research in 2020. We were told that vaccines are inefficient, and that they do not prevent hospitalisation or deaths – a statement clearly disproven by the data. And we were warned that vaccines, especially those involving the messenger RNA (mRNA) mechanism, are causing a wave of sudden deaths of relatively young people, in what was yet another statement disconnected from the data.
It is saddening and revolting to see public structures, built and maintained with the money of the Brazilian people, being used to host almost eight hours of such a depressing spectacle.
