Manaus (Brazil) (AFP)
Vanda Witoto, the first person vaccinated from Amazonas, has received numerous calls from relatives asking if she had "turned into a crocodile".
In the indigenous villages of this state in the north of Brazil, the false information arrived long before the vaccine against the coronavirus.
This comes "from a flood of false information (...) emanating most often from evangelical groups", but which have also "been launched in Brasilia", explains to AFP the doctor Douglas Rodrigues.
He has worked with the indigenous people of the Amazon for five decades.
President Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly minimized the pandemic whose death toll stands at nearly 218,000 in Brazil, did not hesitate in December to launch that the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech could transform people "into crocodile".
"If you become Superman, if a woman starts to have a beard or if a man starts to speak with an effeminate voice (...) it is your problem", he added.
Words that reached the indigenous villages.
"It's really concerning," said the doctor.
"We talk, we explain, and in most cases we convince people (to be vaccinated, editor's note). In other cases, it takes a lot of work and that delays" the vaccination.
Beto Marubo, from the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javarí Valley, evokes "an almost negationist attitude" in the villages of this immense indigenous territory which borders Peru, in the west of the Amazonas.
"There are those who want to be vaccinated and the others (...) who refuse, saying that it is not safe, repeating the words of President Bolsonaro", reports Joao Voia, of the Xokleng ethnic group in Santa Catarina (South).
"We are going to our villages to refute all this," said Vanda Witoto in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, whose hospitals are overwhelmed by a second wave of the pandemic.
This nurse who has just been vaccinated led preventive campaigns in a community of 3,000 indigenous people, near Manaus.
Vanda - or in his language "Derequine" ("courageous ant") - responds to relatives who ask him about his vaccination: "I am not a crocodile, I am a courageous ant".
To block out false information, the natives have launched a #vacinaParente (Vacinetoimonparent) campaign on social networks.
Douglas Rodrigues believes that despite everything the vaccination campaign will end with "a success", like the campaigns against measles, among a people with weak immunity.
- "Genocidal policy" -
Brazil had some 900,000 indigenous people in 2010 (0.4% of its population) and priority was given, for the vaccination against Covid-19, to indigenous people living in villages, to the detriment of those in towns who have access to urban health care.
"The government thinks that the native of the cities is less native than that of the villages", deplores Beto Marubo.
In 11 months of the pandemic, 932 indigenous people have died of the coronavirus and more than 46,000, from 161 different ethnic groups, have been infected, according to the Coordination of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib).
According to a study last July from the University of Pelotas, in Rio Grande do Sul, in cities, natives are five times more likely to be infected than non-natives.
"They present more risks, they live in precariousness", explains Doctor Rodrigues.
"Their exclusion from priority cases is explained by prejudices against the natives."
Throughout history, the natives have been decimated by diseases brought in from outside and are alarmed by the effects of the invasion of their lands by illegal prospectors, especially gold.
On Monday, indigenous women held a virtual meeting on the vaccination campaign.
Célia Xakriaba, an educator from Minas Gerais, opened the forum by declaring: "Our presence disturbs", before calling not to be afraid of the vaccine.
"What we must be afraid of is being suffocated by the genocidal policy of the Bolsonaro government," she said.
The cacique Raoni Matuktire, emblematic defender of the Amazon rainforest, last week asked the International Criminal Court to investigate for "crimes against humanity" against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, accused of "persecuting" indigenous peoples by destroying their habitat and violating their fundamental rights.
© 2021 AFP