SÃO PAULO, Brazil — I don’t know if it’s because I finally got my first Covid shot — maybe hope is a side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine — but for the first time in this long pandemic, I feel that President Jair Bolsonaro may not succeed in destroying us all.
Yes, he’s trying hard: We have registered over 560,000 deaths so far — the second highest toll in the world after the United States’ — and the Delta variant is on its way. From the beginning, the president sabotaged attempts to curb the transmission of the virus, sponsored ineffective treatments, helped to disseminate fake news and allowed, through his negligence, another variant of the virus to spread.
But even Mr. Bolsonaro couldn’t crack Brazilians’ unbreakable love of vaccines. Despite everything — deaths, economic disaster, untold suffering — we haven’t succumbed to despair. Instead, we remain among the world’s most passionate enthusiasts for inoculation.