Wpublic health crisis dramatically worsening, the country’s business leaders and their allies in government are rewriting the rules to secure preferential access to scarce Covid-19 vaccines. Both Congress and the judiciary, with the support of President Jair Bolsonaro, have taken steps in recent weeks to allow private corporate purchases and distribution of vaccines.
On Tuesday — the same day Brazil saw a record 4,211 coronavirus deaths — the lower house of Congress passed a bill that would allow corporations to directly purchase vaccine doses from international suppliers and give them to employees, even before priority groups like the elderly and medical workers are fully vaccinated. “We are at war,” the leader of the chamber, Arthur Lira, argued, “and in war, anything goes to save lives.”
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