‘Bolsonaro effect’ did not affect Covid vaccination, says study

Speeches and behaviors of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) during the Covid-19 pandemic did not affect vaccination against the disease in the country, concluded a study by the UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) in partnership with the IRD (French Institute for Research and Development). Development).

Five researchers analyzed the influence of various socioeconomic and political factors on immunization rates in 5,570 Brazilian municipalities until October 2021, separating those who voted mostly for Bolsonaro in the first round of the 2018 elections.

They hoped that the so-called “Bolsonaro effect” would have stopped vaccination in these places. What they found, however, was an impact only in the first three months of application of the first and second doses. Afterwards, the trend reversed, and cities that supported him became more immunized.

“He never got vaccinated and raised doubts about the vaccine. It seems that this type of behavior had a negative contribution at first, but then time passed and, even seeing the effects of vaccination, people became aware, regardless of whether they voted in it”, says João Saboia, one of the authors of the study.

In addition, according to the researchers, the result demonstrates the strength of the National Immunization Plan (PNI). “There is also this aspect of Brazil having a vaccine tradition. The PNI is spectacular, despite being losing strength”, says the professor emeritus at the UFRJ Institute of Economics.

According to them, the fact that the municipalities that supported the president were vaccinated more with the first dose, observed when data from all quarters is added, can be explained by the high mortality in these places.

“The population, in this case, would have adhered more strongly to vaccination, even as a way of protecting itself in a context of low adherence to non-pharmacological measures, such as isolation or mask use”, they write in the study.

In 2020, the same group had already crossed the cases of the disease with the result of the presidential elections and came to the conclusion that there was a correlation between the preference for Bolsonaro and the expansion and mortality of Covid-19, as other studies have also shown.

Now, however, they decided to expand the analysis on three fronts: first, they recalculated the mortality numbers each quarter for a longer period, finding that the president’s influence on deaths remains in the different phases of the pandemic.

“Our results confirm the importance of the political factor: the Bolsonaro effect resists time and interaction with other factors,” they wrote. Then, they made the same calculations of its impact on vaccination and on the mobility of municipalities.

Using data from Facebook, they concluded that the displacement rate was also higher in cities that elected Bolsonaro. Social isolation was higher in cities with a higher percentage of whites, men, more educated and with a higher average income.

The same elements have driven vaccination rates up. In addition, cities with workers commuting to work in other cities were more immunized, and those with many informal workers, less.

The researchers arrived at these conclusions through coefficients, calculated by complex accounts that take into account the various variables. The report will still be submitted to national and international scientific journals and reviewed by other experts.

With regard to deaths, some results drew attention as they changed throughout the pandemic. If, at the beginning, municipalities with the highest percentage of whites were less likely to be victims of Covid-19, at the end of the period studied they became the most susceptible.

One of the hypotheses for this is the fact that the second wave was more intense in the South region, where a large portion of the population is white. It is worth noting that, in the quarter from August to October 2021, with vaccination in progress, the trend turned negative again.

Cities with more people living in slums were also the most affected by the disease at the beginning, which was reversed with the advancement of immunization, indicating that immunization campaigns may have been very effective in communities, as well as the mobilization of solidarity campaigns.

Finally, the high population density was another factor that initially determined the expansion of the disease, but in the end it lost relevance. This reflects the evolution of the pandemic itself, which first affected urban municipalities and then spread across Brazil.