Misinformation hinders attempt to contain fever
SAO PAULO — Elisangela Santos doesn’t understand why everyone in her neighborhood on the outskirts of Sao Paulo is being told to get vaccinated for yellow fever this year. Yellow fever has long been endemic in parts of Brazil, and she smells a rat.
“Every year, it’s something else,” the 44-year-old school custodian said as she waited recently outside a clinic in the Jardim Miriam district. “They invent another thing to make Brazilians spend money.”
The vaccine is free at public health posts around the country, but Santos’ suspicion that someone must be profiting somewhere is typical of the current high levels of mistrust Brazilians hold for officialdom. Flagging faith in Brazil’s institutions amid a series of corruption scandals, a chaotic communications campaign promoting the vaccine, and the country’s decision to give partial doses to stretch supplies are contributing to rumors that the vaccine is a scam, weak or even dangerous.
The misinformation is scaring people away from the campaign that is trying to vaccinate more than 23 million people in areas of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Bahia states that until recently were not considered at risk for yellow fever. Nearly six weeks into the campaign, the Health Ministry says 76 percent of the target population has been vaccinated — far off its goal of 95 percent.
The current atmosphere of uncertainty and rumors around the vaccine is likely to make the last 20 percent very difficult to reach, hampering the efforts of Latin America’s biggest nation to contain its largest yellow fever outbreak in more than three decades.
The reticence could even lead to a sustained outbreak in Brazil’s megacities. Brazil hasn’t had an urban outbreak since 1942.
“If we have a higher number of infected people with yellow fever and the Aedes aegypti mosquito starts to become infected and transmit yellow fever, it could become urban,” said Luiz Antonio Teixeira Jr., Rio de Janeiro state’s health secretary. “Everything we’re doing is to ensure we don’t have urban yellow fever.”
Yellow fever has long been endemic in large swaths of Brazil, but it has been advancing in recent years and this is the second outbreak in two years in places where vaccinations for the disease were not routine. During the 2016-17 outbreak, more than 770 people were infected after nearly a decade during which Brazil saw fewer than 10 cases each year. In the current outbreak, there have been 846 cases confirmed, of which 260 have died. The outbreak is stressing the health system just a few years after a major outbreak of Zika, which was linked to severe birth defects in babies born to infected mothers.