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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

"700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem"

That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian. In my country of 11 million (including Ukrainian refugees), we've had 45 thousand deaths. And anywhere where people frequent Facebook, the anti-vax movement thrives. It is not even specifically far-right, a lot of the crowd belongs to the organic green bio-mom milieu. I can't even begin to count all the middle-aged ladies in colourful ethnic clothing who hate vaccines based on very flimsy arguments.

The coup thing is fairly unique, though.

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>That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian.

Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. Our health system had one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world, we were nearing 100% rates on a country with a scale of continent. Since Bolsonaro our rates are dropping on a very alarming rate and on the streets you see people trash talking vaccines all the time, even solved diseases and infections are returning because of this.

And about the 700k deaths, a lot of studies have been published proving that if the piece of shit bought the vaccines earlier hundreds of thousands of lives could've been saved, or if he did not made a public campaign AGAINST the vaccine we could've saved countless lives.

"Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. "

In that sense, you were lucky before. In the Western world, widespread anti-vax paranoia dates at least back to the infamous Wakefield paper (1998) linking vaccination to autism. It was probably just a matter of time until it skipped over the ocean to Brazil as well. Language barrier might have protected you temporarily, but with the advent of automatic translation, it has been significantly lowered.

Ironically, there is no vaccine against bad ideas such as anti-vaxxery.

Anti-vax existed in the US long before that. It was common in the hippy alt health movement for decades. Bullshit is a powerful force. So much so that it might be the norm not the exception.

> The coup thing is fairly unique, though.

Not as much. It was heavily inspired by the events in the USA.

> it was heavily inspired by a Russian-Chinese coalition trying to create a powerbloc in Latin America, and who also pushed for the same thing in the US

Lol Lula da Silva is much more pro-Russia and pro-China than Bolsonaro ever was

Yeah GP seems to have gotten a bit lost in ideology.

It's especially interesting since the whole thing with Steve Bannon & co. is pretty widely knwon.

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