Covid-19, the anti-vaccine movement and immunization challenges in Brazil: A review

Covid-19 Outbreak in Brazil: Health, Social, Political, and Economic Implications

COVID-19 outbreak quickly spread to all corners of the globe. In Brazil, the outbreak was particularly frightening because it worsened existing health, political, economic, and social problems. The results already observed show the contagion ripple-spreading process across the country, causing the death of thousands of people each day and counting, added to a very serious wave of unemployment, scientific denial, and social precariousness. Based on this, this study reviews recent research that looked at the role of the government, the Brazilian health system, and the main economic and social impacts fostered by the pandemic. We perform a scoping review according to the PRISMA-ScR to structure the qualitative synthesis of the 67 associated documents. The results reinforce the negative effects of the country's mismanagement and its consequent impacts on the Brazilian economy and society. The battleground against COVID-19 has fueled political tensions, shaken the health system, and unleashed social despair tinged with thousands of deaths. Finally, in the present scoping review, we discuss concerns about the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak in Brazil and what the world hopes the country has learned from the current crisis.

Illusion of Truth: Analysing and Classifying COVID-19 Fake News in Brazilian Portuguese Language

Public health interventions to counter the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated and increased digital adoption and use of the Internet for sourcing health information. Unfortunately, there is evidence to suggest that it has also accelerated and increased the spread of false information relating to COVID-19. The consequences of misinformation, disinformation and misinterpretation of health information can interfere with attempts to curb the virus, delay or result in failure to seek or continue legitimate medical treatment and adherence to vaccination, as well as interfere with sound public health policy and attempts to disseminate public health messages. While there is a significant body of literature, datasets and tools to support countermeasures against the spread of false information online in resource-rich languages such as English and Chinese, there are few such resources to support Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese specifically. In this study, we explore the use of machine learning and deep learning techniques to identify fake news in online communications in the Brazilian Portuguese language relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. We build a dataset of 11,382 items comprising data from January 2020 to February 2021. Exploratory data analysis suggests that fake news about the COVID-19 vaccine was prevalent in Brazil, much of it related to government communications. To mitigate the adverse impact of fake news, we analyse the impact of machine learning to detect fake news based on stop words in communications. The results suggest that stop words improve the performance of the models when keeping them within the message. Random Forest was the machine learning model with the best results, achieving 97.91% of precision, while Bi-GRU was the best deep learning model with an F1 score of 94.03%.

Political Populism, Institutional Distrust and Vaccination Uptake: A Mediation Analysis

Politics is ubiquitous in public health, but vaccines had never been weaponized to instill distrust to gain political advantage. In pandemic and post-pandemic scenarios, populist political parties could use vaccine-related issues to generate distrust in evidence-based knowledge. Therefore, some questions arise. What impact could populist political parties impinge on vaccination uptake rates through sowing political discontent? What could the medical institutions do to avoid the adverse effects that these political strategies could infringe? For answering these research questions, we first hypothesized that vaccine uptake was negatively associated with distrust in the institutions. Furthermore, we analyzed whether populism mediates this relationship. In doing so, we hypothesized a positive association between distrust and populism, because populists, mainly fueled by politically discontent citizens, offer hope of a better future, blaming their misfortune on the actions of the elite. Additionally, we hypothesized that those citizens with a higher level of political dissatisfaction, following the claims of the populist political parties, will have lower vaccine uptake results, because they will be discouraged from making the efforts to counter the pandemic. Based on a survey carried out by the European Commission that covered 27 E.U. + U.K. countries (totaling 27,524 respondents), this paper proves that an individual’s political discontent fully mediates the relationship between distrust in institutions and vaccine uptake. Targeting the vaccine-hesitant population is quite convenient for populists because they only need to convince a minority of citizens not to be vaccinated to achieve their destabilizing goals. New outbreaks will appear if the minimum herd immunity coverage is not reached, reinforcing a vicious circle of distrust in elites, in consequence. For tackling this matter, recommendations are given to institutional managers from a social marketing standpoint.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Political Populism. An Invariant Cross-European Perspective

Vaccine-hesitancy and political populism are positively associated across Europe: those countries in which their citizens present higher populist attitudes are those that also have higher vaccine-hesitancy rates. The same key driver fuels them: distrust in institutions, elites, and experts. The reluctance of citizens to be vaccinated fits perfectly in populist political agendas because is a source of instability that has a distinctive characteristic known as the “small pockets” issue. It means that the level at which immunization coverage needs to be maintained to be effective is so high that a small number of vaccine-hesitants have enormous adverse effects on herd immunity and epidemic spread. In pandemic and post-pandemic scenarios, vaccine-hesitancy could be used by populists as one of the most effective tools for generating distrust. This research presents an invariant measurement model applied to 27 EU + UK countries (27,524 participants) that segments the different behaviours found, and gives social-marketing recommendations for coping with the vaccine-hesitancy problem when used for generating distrust.