Measles in Brazil
Brazil was one of the countries that have been measles-free for a while now. With the antivax sentiment growing worldwide — or people just taking vaccines for granted and not paying enough attention to them — it's expected that some diseases might come back every once in a while.
Well, there's been a measles outbreak in São Paulo.
How big of an outbreak? Less than 50 cases.
What was the government's answer? Full-on vaccination campaign for everyone in the cities where the cases happened. Every public clinic already has stocks of the vaccine, and they are also vaccinating people at some metro stations, all you need is the ID card (having the vaccination card is good too). I took my shot yesterday and it took, like, 5 minutes. The nurse there even saw that I had an overdue yellow fever shot, which I never took because I was in Portugal at the time. She advised me to take it, but I have to wait 30 days after this one.
It's worth noting that every child born and/or raised in Brazil is already vaccinated against measles (myself included), so this is more to reinforce the immune system than anything else. Measles is one of those sneaky diseases — even if not fatal to you, they erase all of your immunity, making you open to reinfection from things your body knew how to protect itself against. They call it immune amnesia. Being a tropical country, we take vaccination and disease prevention very seriously here.
Of course, this is all provided for free by the public healthcare system we have — which some people say has one of the best logistics in the world, considering the size of the country and how fast the government has done nationwide vaccination campaigns in the past1.
Fun fact: even foreigners not registered in Brazil or without health insurance can be treated for free at emergency services. Public healthcare here is treated as a universal right. It's not perfect and I have tons of things to criticize, but boy, am I glad for it to exist.
There are some stories about Pfizer wanting to give Brazil first-dibs on their COVID vaccines because of that, but Bolsonaro ignored it, because he's an idiot and a terrible person.↩