However, while nations are concerned with ensuring access to a vaccine, the possible geopolitical implications mean nothing in this neighborhood. “Being a volunteer is an act of love, donating a little of yourself to people,” said Abranches. Like many health workers, she has been separated from her family for months after the Brazilian pandemic, to prevent the spread of the virus, and often was unable to hold back tears when asked about loved ones she missed. .
“Loneliness is greater in patients who suffer,” he said, as if to verify his own loneliness. “Being here for the entire period, seeing patients die, often without saying goodbye to their families, moved us all here. I really wanted to help, and the vaccine trial needs people like us who are at high risk of contamination”.
As a dentist at the Hospital de Sao Paulo, she spends her days immersed in infected saliva, which places her among the highest-risk subjects the trial could have chosen when injected in late June. Many others in your neighborhood have also signed up for this vital trial worldwide.
As we go through their daily routine of life-saving procedures, a tracheostomy and extubation in just 30 minutes, more staff reveals that they have received the puncture and endure the routine checks and tests that follow. One will receive the test vaccine this week. Another is thinking about it. Her boss, Professor Flavia Machado, said that she is the thousandth recipient.
Security procedures in the room remain strict. They still don’t know if the vaccine works. And because it is a double-blind trial, no one knows if they have received the vaccine or a placebo.
Development of vaccines at “warp speed”
So after five months of mitigating the suffering of one of the most affected cities in the world, São Paulo medical workers are now being asked to help bring hope to the rest of the world.
Sinovac’s trial began last week with now a handful of recipients in the São Paulo health system. However, an unexpected side effect has emerged, not from the vaccine but from the geopolitical race for it. A small swath of angry Brazilians have protested on social media against the “China vaccine.” They echo the previous rhetoric, say critics, of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the Trump administration about the “Chinese virus.”
“God help me not to take the vaccine made by those who created the virus! #Thank you #chinesevaccineNO,” says a Portuguese Twitter user posting about the Sinovac vaccine. “My friends, don’t allow yourselves to be GUINEA PIG of CHINESE DICTATORSING and Doria (expletive),” says another, referring to the Governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria, with the same hashtag #chinesevaccineNO.
As a result, the Sinovac project has recommended that its collaborators hide their identities. “This is the main concern,” said prominent epidemiologist and Sinovac trial leader Dr. Esper Kallas. “Some people may react strangely these days to a volunteer who participated in a vaccine that was conceptualized in a Chinese company.”
Kallas added that he does not see the vaccine alternatives as Chinese, British or American. “These are vaccines of humanity,” he said. “We need to have them available to combat this pandemic worldwide. And perhaps the final solution will not be a vaccine, but a combination of them.”
So far, only one participant in the Sinovac trial has spoken publicly, Stephanie Texieira Porto. A young doctor, she has also been separated from her family for the past five months, and her eyes blur when she mentions her 90-year-old grandmother whom she has not seen.
She says she received only kind words about her decision to participate in Sinovac’s trial on social media, but trial organizers warned her it could be different. “They told me not to expose myself too much, to try not to tell everyone what this study will be like. It’s very strange, everything. I don’t understand why [some people] I hate China. “
She is reluctant to discuss the role that Bolsonaro and his supporters have played in promoting anti-Chinese rhetoric. “Our president, everything he says is important and the people believe him. He says … it is the flu. He has said bad things about China. I prefer not to talk about him.”
If successful, the two vaccine trials already underway should bring the mass-produced vaccines to Brazil faster. AstraZeneca agreed to allow the Fiocruz center in Brazil to produce the vaccine locally, producing bulk quantities even before the trial ends, and Sinovac agreed to share its technology with Brazilian partners. Brazil’s acting health minister recently expressed interest in buying doses of the drug that Pfizer is also developing, although it has not yet started testing the drug in São Paulo. The company did not return a request for comment.
For Kallas, talking about a race between nations and companies is an unsuccessful distraction for the global task at hand. “This is a threat to all of us and finding a collective solution is the only way to go.”
Porto agreed. The world powers may “feel that they are in a race, but it is a common effort for humanity to return to our lives again.”
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