Indigenous leaders warn of missionaries turning Amazon villages against vaccines
By Anthony Boadle
Health Editor’s Note: Shame on any group who would try to keep people from getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Specifically playing off fears of those who do not understand the process of how the virus replicates, spreads, and harms and kills humans is particularly heinous. Coronavirus vaccines are essential to put a halt to this pandemic that is sickening hundreds of thousands daily, and killing thousands more. Daily the U.S. alone looses several thousand people to the ravages of this virus This is NOT acceptable! The numbers of those who contract the virus, become ill, perhaps so ill they die, will dwindle as long as we can vaccinate as many people, as quickly, as possible. Every person who is vaccinated is one less person the virus can use to make more of itself and to spread.
While this particular misinformation campaign is taking place in Brazil, we have groups working to achieve the same in the U.S. Those groups are the anti-vaxxers, those who deny the existence of coronavirus, those who would have us believe that nanobots and or microchips will be injected into the body with the vaccine, that the vaccine will make people sterile, etc. These naysayers continue to spout their misinformation and false rumors about COVID-19 vaccine. Those who run these groups should be arrested and convicted for social murder if they succeed in convincing just one person that he or she should not take the vaccine. The vaccine is the only way out of this pandemic…..Carol
BRASILIA (Reuters) – Medical teams working to immunize Brazil’s remote indigenous villages against the coronavirus have encountered fierce resistance in some communities where evangelical missionaries are stoking fears of the vaccine, say tribal leaders and advocates.
On the São Francisco reservation in the state of Amazonas, Jamamadi villagers sent health workers packing with bows and arrows when they visited by helicopter this month, said Claudemir da Silva, an Apurinã leader representing indigenous communities on the Purus river, a tributary of the Amazon.
“It’s not happening in all villages, just in those that have missionaries or evangelical chapels where pastors are convincing the people not to receive the vaccine, that they will turn into an alligator and other crazy ideas,” he said by phone.
That has added to fears that COVID-19 could roar through Brazil’s more than 800,000 indigenous people, whose communal living and often precarious healthcare make them a priority in the national immunization program.
Tribal leaders blame Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and some of his avid supporters in the evangelical community for stoking skepticism about coronavirus vaccines, despite a national death toll that lags only the United States.
