Brazil is going through its worst moment of the Pandemic to date. The country is experiencing its worst numbers of fatalities and new cases, while across much of the country the health system is on the brink of total collapse, which could see the number of deaths rise dramatically. Officially, ICU occupancy rates already exceed 90% in 15 of Brazil’s 26 states. Even the mainstream press is now acknowledging the need for a lockdown.
Yet with all this occurring, various states have only adopted occasional and piecemeal measures, which are essentially aimed at producing a partial reduction in infection levels, just enough to avoid the total collapse of the health system and increase the numbers of beds in temporary field hospitals. This is not enough! Beyond this, there are the state governments and media outlets that continue to defend the reopening of the schools and act as accomplices to our tragedy. A policy of “pandemic management” that indefinitely keeps deaths at a level of one thousand a day is of no use to us. According to official figures, Brazil in the first 57 days of 2021 has seen 57,886 deaths. Today (27 February), the country has the highest daily moving average of the whole Pandemic: 1,153 deaths.
No country in the world has beaten the Pandemic without a nationally coordinated policy of containment. Lockdown is not night-time curfews, nor restricting the opening hours of bars and pubs – these are one-off and insufficient measures of mitigation. An effective lockdown implies the establishment of rigorous measures that guarantee an effective reduction in movement and circulation throughout the nation, and for a period of time sufficient to produce a radical reduction in the number of active cases. Therefore, aside from some precarious and very brief efforts in a few municipalities, Brazil has not at any time had anything that can be considered a lockdown. However, the dissemination of fake news by the Bolsonarista ‘Cabinet of Hate’ makes some in the population believe that we have had a lockdown and that it did not work. A year of Pandemic produced enormous strain and attrition among the population, the product of a deliberate Bolsonarista campaign of disinformation. A national policy of containment, sustained by emergency income, and that guaranteed the total and unconditional closure of all non-essential services for 15 or 20 days, would be infinitely less stressful than indefinitely maintaining a situation of uncontrolled transmission.
The Bolsonaro government is avowedly the worst in the world when it comes to the fight against the Pandemic. Its strategy, subordinated to the immediate interests of capitalist accumulation, is based on the absurd assumption that indiscriminate contamination would produce “herd immunity”. Bolsonaro repeated 34 times that the Pandemic would only be overcome “when a part of the population is infected and obtains antibodies”. It is in this light that he celebrates those who have “recovered”, ignoring their serious aftereffects, and has even instituted the macabre “Placar da Vida” (Scoreboard of Life). In order to implement this strategy, Bolsonaro has downplayed the Pandemic, which he calls the “gripezinha” (little flu), promoted drugs that were proven to be ineffective, restricted testing, turned underreporting into official policy, encouraged the gathering of crowds, and discouraged the use of masks. And he still continues to do so. The very high rates of transmission mean that Brazil has a death rate four times higher per million than the world average (and that’s in already underreported official figures). Besides all this, it was this policy that led to the production of COVID-19 mutations such as the new P1 strain (known internationally as the “Brazil variant”), which apart from being more transmissible and possibly more lethal, puts the effectiveness of vaccines at risk and makes re-infection far more common. In other words, even those who believe that they were “immunized” via infection become re-infected and add to the statistics of hospitalizations and deaths, as we have already seen in Manaus in January. Cynically, Minister of Health General Pazuello now places the blame on mutations, which are in fact the logical result of his very policy.
The identification of mutations that put vaccine effectiveness at risk has produced a reaction internationally, with practically the whole world tightening up their containment measures. Yet even in the face of these more transmissible variants, the world’s weekly moving average of daily cases has fallen by 36%, from 598,991 cases on 1 February to 386,164 on 27 February. Yet Brazil is more than ever heading in the opposite direction, with its moving average increasing by 50% in the same period from 35,733 to 53,422. It is high time that people understood that the pandemic will not disappear by itself!
There is no other possible way forward! It is urgent to establish a national lockdown, with guaranteed emergency aid, job stability, and financial aid to small businesses through non-refundable public grants. The resources do exist for the financing of this much-needed emergency plan, which includes (a) the immediate repeal of the budgetary ‘Teto dos Gastos’ (Spending Ceiling) for the expansion of emergency public investments; (b) the suspension of the payment of public debt to big creditors for the financing of the public health system; and (c) taxing of large fortunes and the private banks to guarantee emergency income and financial aid for small business.
Along with these measures cited above, the immediate acceleration of the national vaccination policy is vital. The political choices taken by this government in 2020 mean that today we have very few vaccine doses and a vaccination rate at which it would take two years just to vaccinate the priority groups set out in the National Vaccination Plan (77.2 million, or 36% of the population), and four years to vaccinate 70% of the population. Vaccinations at this rate make vaccination itself meaningless because for immunization to work, the rate of vaccination has to be higher than the rate of contamination! It is a matter of urgency that the Brazilian government must sign new contracts and acquire more vaccine doses. At the same time, the patents for these vaccines must be broken, because the immunization of the world’s population cannot remain in the hands of giant pharmaceutical corporations. Moreover, National Vaccination Plan needs to be effectively carried out, which means that all vaccinations be administered in accordance with the guidelines and priorities of this Plan, and that any commodification of the vaccines and offering them to the private network is ethically and politically unacceptable. If the dominant groups in society gain private access to vaccines and jump the queue, they will not only feel protected but their denialism, which victimizes all workers, will be further radicalized.
* For an immediate National Lockdown
* For the immediate resumption of emergency income
* Guarantee job stability for the duration of the pandemic
* Financial aid for small business, through non-refundable grants
* No resumption of classes without the prior immunization of the population
* Vaccines for all that are free, public, and administered through the Unified Health System (SUS)
* For the effective implementation of the National Vaccination Plan
* Bolsonaro Out! Impeachment now!
This article is an English translation of “Por um lockdown nacional, com garantia de renda emergencial e vacina para todos”, Esquerda Online (EOL), 27/02/2021.
Translation: Bobby Sparks
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