Bolsonaro says 11-year-old daughter will not be vaccinated against Covid

President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) told reporters this Monday afternoon (27) that his 11-year-old daughter Laura will not be vaccinated against Covid. In recent weeks, Bolsonaro has raised suspicions about the safety of the immunizing agent, already approved by Anvisa for use in children over 5 years of age.

“The vaccine for children is still very incipient, the world still has many doubts”, said Bolsonaro upon arriving in São Francisco do Sul (SC), where he will spend New Year’s Eve.

The president also stated that the minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, should define on January 5th how the norms for the vaccination of children will be. “I hope there is no interference from the judiciary,” Bolsonaro said.

On Thursday (23), Queiroga said that children can only be vaccinated with a medical prescription and parental consent. The National Council of Health Secretaries reacted saying that no medical document will be required for immunization in this age group.

This Monday, asked if the Influenza virus is a concern for the government, Bolsonaro said he is not vaccinated and again raised doubts about the effectiveness of immunization agents.

“At first, most of the infected were vaccinated,” he said.

“I, for example, am not vaccinated,” he said, without clarifying whether he was talking about Influenza or Covid-19. “I have natural immunity. Several studies say it’s much better than vaccine immunity.”

Then, the president cited the case of Queiroga, immunized and infected by the new coronavirus during a presidential trip to New York (USA), in September. Vaccines do not completely prevent infection, but they are more than 90% effective in reducing severe cases.

In a technical note sent to the Supreme Court (Supreme Court), the extraordinary secretary for the fight against Covid-19, Rosana Leite de Melo, contradicted Bolsonaro’s position and said that the vaccine against Covid-19 developed for children is safe, that the immunizing agent it is a protection tool and that vaccination will alleviate class interruptions in the pandemic.

On Friday, the president repeated Queiroga’s speech and said that “there is no child death” to justify an emergency decision on the Covid-19 vaccine for children.

According to data from the Epidemiological Surveillance System for Influenza (SIVEP-Influenza), since the beginning of the pandemic until December 6 of this year, 301 deaths of children between 5 and 11 years old due to Covid-19 were registered in the country.

In 2020, 2,978 children had severe acute respiratory syndrome due to the coronavirus—156 of them died. This year, there were 3,185 cases in this age group, with 145 deaths.

The Ministry of Health even opened a public consultation on the vaccination of children, considered “idiotic”, “procrastination”, “absurd” and “a stone age thing” by specialists in infectious diseases and public health consulted by leaf.

On December 16, Anvisa authorized the use of Pfizer’s vaccine to immunize children. Agency directors have received threats because of the drug’s review of the application. Anvisa requested, but did not receive police protection from its top and most exposed technicians.

The agency’s president, Antonio Barra Torres, told the leaf that the approval of the technical area was based on robust studies of the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, in addition to epidemiological data. “Our country has significant numbers of mortality in this age group.”