COVID rumours hamper Brazil’s efforts to vaccinate Indigenous

False claims include that the vaccine turns recipients into animals, or that it includes a chip ‘to control the Indigenous people’.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Indigenous nurse Almeida Tananta battled heavy downpours of tropical rains as he rode his motorbike for hours across the red-soiled dirt tracks of Tabatinga, a municipality in Western Amazonas, which borders the Amazon rainforest and Colombia, and has the largest concentration of Indigenous Brazilians in the Amazon. Tananta was en route to apply the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to the remote Umariacu villagers, in Alto Rio Solimoes. But when he arrived at the village of wooden-thatched houses skirting the banks of the Amazon river, the nurse’s hopes of vaccinating the 1,037 villagers quickly vanished. “Indigenous people of all ages are rejecting the vaccine. They’re terrified that if they take it, they’ll turn into an animal, or die”, Tananta told Al Jazeera.