By Emir Sader on 12/30/2021
Vaccination campaign in Manaus photo: Marcely Gomes/Semcom.
Vaccine, that has been the word voted as the most important one of 2021 in Brazil. With good reason. Because there is a strong denialist movement in the world that seeks to oppose science, vaccines, and knowledge.
A movement that has its strongest headquarters in the United States, France and other European countries where, incredibly, despite their cultural level, important sectors of the population, while a minority, oppose vaccination, with different types of arguments.
The first of these arguments would be the individual right of each person to decide whether to be vaccinated or not. Referring to the predominant liberalism in the field of ideas in today’s world, it appeals to an individual decision as paramount. The right of everyone to decide whether or not to be vaccinated. The right to receive the vaccine or not.
Ignoring or denying the scientifically established idea that contamination is the most normal transmission procedure and that, therefore, to be vaccinated is not only to defend oneself from the disease, but also to protect others. An elementary idea from the point of view of science, but unknown to the denialists.
In Brazil, the most common argument of government members is the non-mandatory nature of vaccination. It seems reasonable. They do not recognize the right to be vaccinated, not even that of children – present in the Statute of the Child – overriding the right to individual freedom not to be vaccinated.
Walking down the street without being vaccinated, entering closed places without being vaccinated, seems reasonable to them.
It is a fundamental principle of liberalism. On this basis they preach the end of compulsory voting. A right, of electing rulers, cannot become a duty. An argument that seems convincing.
In the United States, elections are held on the first Tuesday in November, a working day, with no right to be absent to vote. Voting is discouraged.
As a result, what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority” tends to prevail, the one that felt overwhelmed by the great democratic movements of the 1960s and 1970s, black rights, women’s rights and other sectors neglected by the current political system.
The rulers end up being elected by a minority giving them less strength, less legitimacy to govern. It is another way of preaching the minimal State and, as a consequence, the centrality of the market. They cover up this reasoning with the apology of civil society, the set of all individuals in society, which would be the source of democracy, when this society predominates over the State and not the other way around.
This is one of the foundations of the hegemony of liberalism in the contemporary world. The struggle of democracy against totalitarianism, a principle of U.S. international policy, thus promoting individual right over collective right. That of civil society over the State. A weak state is more easily captured by the market, by the private interests of big business.
Chile decided a few years ago to put an end to compulsory voting, with arguments of that order. Now there is a large majority of abstentions. Young people, who let themselves be carried away by arguments against politics, against parties, against the State, did not even take out their electoral documents.
Michele Bachelet, a president of great prestige, was elected with about 27% of the votes. In Chile’s recent elections, despite the great mobilization and polarization of society, more than 50% of Chileans did not vote. One of the achievements of the second round, which elected Gabriel Boric as president of the country, was that just over 50%, 53% to be more precise, voted.
The Chilean Constituent Assembly must reverse the end of compulsory voting. One realizes that elections, in democracy, are a moment when people must be awakened to the awareness of their rights and the need to participate in the country’s major decisions, including the election of its governors.
Through the facts, this individual and individualistic principle, repeatedly preached by Bolsonaro, not to be vaccinated, was resoundingly defeated. Due to the tradition accumulated in previous decades, which built a formidable vaccination system throughout the country, Brazilians realized the need for vaccination.
And they denied and defeated the government, by massively going out to get vaccinated. They put pressure on the provincial and municipal governments, to promote vaccination, to obtain vaccines. And the Brazilian Health System (SUS) played the fundamental role of ensuring that everyone was vaccinated.
We must not only celebrate this fact, but also spread what is behind it: the victory of science and collective rights, when they clash with individual rights.
By massively vaccinating, massively seeking vaccines, finding in the SUS the fundamental instrument to vaccinate the Brazilian people defeated Bolsonaro’s negationism.
Sources: Rebelión, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English