Dr. Gabriela Kucharski's city of Toledo had virtually no vaccines. And it's a bastion of support for Brazil's vaccine skeptic president. Here's why that didn't matter.
Dr. Gabriela Kucharski is the secretary of health for Toledo, a city in southwestern Brazil. Amid the worst of the pandemic, she convinced Pfizer to choose Toledo for an experiment that would provide free COVID vaccines for every resident.Dr. Gabriela Kucharski is the secretary of health for Toledo, a city in southwestern Brazil. Amid the worst of the pandemic, she convinced Pfizer to choose Toledo for an experiment that would provide free COVID vaccines for every resident.
"We didn't have enough hospital beds of intensive care here in Toledo – or anywhere else," says Kucharski."Wherever you went, nobody had them." There was no question, she adds, that people were dying as a result. Now, this Pfizer experiment promised literal salvation.But there was a catch. Toledo was one of eight cities in contention for the study. Pfizer would only choose one. So Kucharski would have to put together a detailed case for why Toledo should be their pick.
Specifically, she needed data. Pedrotti was the team's statistics expert. At the start of the pandemic he'd set up a system to monitor all sorts of metrics. Miguel Lago is executive director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies, a Brazil-based think tank. He notes that Bolsonaro had been especially dismissive of vaccines.This includes the president's trumpeting the example of a person in a COVID vaccine trial who happened to die by suicide."As being some kind of proof that the vaccination was a danger for people," says Lagos.be getting vaccinated. It's still not known if he has.
The video starts with a single strum of a guitar. Kucharski points to the screen,"Do you see the line?" People are camped out in lawn chairs. As the video ends, Kucharski starts to dab her eyes. She gives an embarrassed laugh."I saw this already I think 10 times, and I always cry," she says."Because I remember every sick person, and everyone who died, and" – she stifles a sob –"and who we couldn't vaccinate."
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