From Rio de Janeiro
“Vaccine“was voted the most important word of 2021. Rightly so. Because there is a strong denialism in the world that seeks to oppose science, vaccines, knowledge.
A movement that has its strongest headquarters in U.S, France and other European countries where, incredibly, despite their cultural level, important sectors of the population – albeit minorities – oppose vaccination, with different types of arguments.
The first of these would be the individual right of each one to decide whether to get vaccinated or not. When referring to the prevailing liberalism in the field of ideas in the world today, he appeals to an individual decision. The right of everyone to decide whether to get vaccinated or not. The right to receive or not the vaccine.
Disregard or deny the scientifically established idea that contagion is the most normal transmission procedure and that, therefore, getting vaccinated is not just defending yourself from the disease, but protecting others. An elementary idea from the point of view of science, but which is unknown to deniers.
In Brazil, the most common argument from members of the government is the non-mandatory nature of vaccination. It seems reasonable. They do not recognize the right to be vaccinated, not even that of children -presented in the Children’s Statute-, nullifying the right to individual freedom not to be vaccinated. Walking down the street without being vaccinated, entering closed places without having been vaccinated, seems reasonable to them.
Is a fundamental principle of liberalism. On this basis they preach the end of compulsory voting. A right, to elect rulers, cannot become a duty. An argument that seems convincing from the market. They cover up this reasoning with the apology of civil society, the set of all individuals in society, which would be the source of democracy, when this society predominates over the State and not the other way around.
This is one of the foundations of the hegemony of liberalism in the contemporary world. Democracy’s struggle against totalitarianism, a principle of US international politics, thus promotes individual law over collective law. Society law on the state. A weak state is more easily captured by the market, for the private interests of large companies.
Through the facts, this individual and individualistic principle, repeatedly preached by Jair Bolsonaro, of not getting vaccinated, was roundly defeated. Due to the tradition accumulated in previous decades, which built a formidable vaccination system, centered on the Unified Health System (SUS), throughout the country, Brazilians realized the need for vaccination.
And they denied and defeated the government, going en masse to get vaccinated. They forced the provincial and municipal governments to promote vaccination, obtain vaccines. And the SUS played a critical role in ensuring that everyone was vaccinated.
It is not only necessary to celebrate this fact, but to propagate what is behind it: the victory of science and collective rights, when they collide with individual rights.
Massively vaccinating, massively searching for vaccines, finding in the SUS the fundamental instrument to vaccinate the Brazilian people, has defeated Bolsonaro’s denialism.
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