Brazil mandates COVID-19 vaccine for children

Brazil’s Health Ministry Tuesday announced the COVID-19 vaccine will now be added to the mandatory annual National Immunization Program (PNI) for children.

The Lula administration will prioritize children aged six months to five years old for the shots, reports Gazeta Brasil.

“During the pandemic, a parallel program was created to operationalize the Covid-19 vaccine, outside of our national program," said the Health Ministry's Health and Environment Surveillance Secretary Ethel Maciel. "What we did this year was to bring the vaccine against Covid-19 into the National Immunization Program. The vaccine is now recommended in the children's calendar. For all children born or who are in Brazil, aged between 6 months and under 5 years, the vaccine becomes mandatory in the vaccination calendar.”

Parents of unvaccinated children will be denied welfare and may be subject to fines, reports Revista Oeste. Unvaccinated children will be denied entry to schools.

Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been openly totalitarian on vaccines, which he called “a guarantee of life” and accused parents who do not vaccinate their children as having no love for them.

“For God’s sake, we can’t be ignorant to the point of thinking it’s not worth getting vaccinated,” Lula said. “I keep asking myself what kind of love does this mother have for her children, that she doesn’t take care of them at the most important moment when they can be vaccinated and can avoid a more delicate disease in their lives,” he added.

In January, shortly after taking office for the third time, Lula announced he would make Brazil’s Bolsa Familia welfare program contingent on child vaccinations. Bolsa Familia provides social welfare to Brazilian families who have children up to 17 years old and live in poverty or extreme poverty. 

“The Bolsa Família is coming back, and it is coming back with something important; it is coming back with conditions. The children have to be in school. If they are not in school, the mother loses the benefit,” said Lula. “The children have to be vaccinated. Suppose they don’t have a vaccination certificate. In that case, the mother will lose the benefit.”

In December Lula vowed to use the power of his office to force those who opposed the COVID-19 vaccine to apologize. 

"We can't, in a hasty way, think that we are going to announce the vaccine, and the people will get it. No. People have to be convinced again of the effectiveness of the vaccine, and we are going to have to get a lot of people who opposed the vaccine, who are going to have to apologize,” said Lula, according to CNN Brasil. 

Lula, who practices Brazil’s official religion of Catholicism, also promised to go after Evangelical churches and confront them over their stance on the injections. 

“I, at least, intend to go to several Evangelical churches and discuss with their leaders the following, 'What is your behavior regarding the vaccine issue? Or we will hold you responsible for people's deaths,” Lula said. 

In April, Brazil’s Health Ministry demanded that the Federal Council of Medicine (CFM) take action against health experts who do not embrace all vaccines, which it called “denialism.” The ministry claimed that misinformation has been propagated by professionals in all areas of health and that “hesitation in vaccines has brought harm to the population.”

To support its claim, the ministry cited the World Health Organization (WHO), which determined vaccine hesitancy to be one of the ten biggest threats to global health.