MC Fioti’s ‘vaccine anthem’ remix celebrates coronavirus inoculation with music video shot at biomedical research centre
Leandro Aparecido Ferreira laid bricks and flipped burgers for a living until becoming one of Brazil’s most famous funk musicians.
This year, the 26-year-old – whose stage name is MC Fioti – has added a new and unexpected string to his bow: as an unlikely champion of science and vaccinology in a country being pounded by coronavirus.
Continue reading...Berlin planning to ban travel from UK, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa to stop spread of variants
Germany is planning a near-total ban on travellers from Britain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa as European governments increasingly move to bar entry from countries where more contagious Covid-19 variants are rampant.
Berlin’s initiative came as EU interior ministers met to discuss a more coordinated approach to international travel restrictions.
Continue reading...Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, looks at the surge of infections in the Brazilian state of Amazonas that has left many hospitals without the most basic supplies and has prompted yet more protests against Bolsonaro
Rachel Humphreys talks to the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, about the Covid crisis in Brazil. A surge in infections linked to a new and seemingly more contagious variant has overwhelmed hospitals in Amazonas state, leaving many without the most basic supplies. Circumstances were so bleak that oxygen tankers were rushed over the border from Venezuela, the economically collapsed nation next door, with its leader, Nicolás Maduro, decrying what he called “Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster”.
Tom tells Rachel about the way the public have reacted to Bolsonaro and his government’s handling of this latest wave of infections. Inoculation began last Sunday, weeks after other Latin American countries such as Chile and Mexico. But Brazil, which has 212 million citizens, has so far secured only 6m doses of China’s CoronaVac shot and 2m of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine.
Continue reading...Biggest ever survey finds two-thirds of people think climate change is a global emergency
The biggest ever opinion poll on climate change has found two-thirds of people think it is a “global emergency”.
The survey shows people across the world support climate action and gives politicians a clear mandate to take the major action needed, according to the UN organisation that carried out the poll.
Continue reading...Protests take place across country at what many see as president’s shambolic Covid response
Thousands of Brazilians have taken to the streets in their cars to demand Jair Bolsonaro’s impeachment as polls showed support for the far-right president slipping over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Saturday, as Brazil’s official Covid-19 death toll hit 216,000, leftwing and centrist protesters organised motorcade rallies in more than 20 state capitals, including Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Belém.
Continue reading...Hospitals in Amazonas state overwhelmed after surge in infections linked to new variant, leaving many without even the most basic supplies
It took just 60 minutes at daybreak for the seven patients to die, asphyxiated as coronavirus swept back into the Brazilian Amazon with nightmarish force.
“Today was one of the hardest days in all my years of public service. You feel so impotent,” sobbed Francisnalva Mendes, the health chief in the river town of Coari, as she remembered the moment on Tuesday when its hospital’s oxygen supply ran out.
Continue reading...Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, has sent an emergency shipment of oxygen to his country’s border with Brazil in a politically charged gesture he said was to help alleviate “Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster”.
In recent days the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which borders southern Venezuela, has been plunged into coronavirus chaos for the second time in under a year.
Continue reading...São Paulo governor João Doria takes aim at Brazil’s president after his state beat federal authorities to secure first coronavirus vaccines
Brazil’s first Covid-19 vaccine has been administered after more than 209,000 deaths, sparking an outpouring of emotion and a ferocious political skirmish that saw one of President Jair Bolsonaro’s key rivals accuse him of revelling in the “stench of death”.
The China-made CoronaVac was injected into the arm of a frontline nurse in São Paulo at 3.30pm local time, after Brazil’s health regulator approved the emergency use of vaccines produced by China’s Sinovac and Oxford/AstraZeneca.
Continue reading...Dominic Raab says UK needs to respond to variants from Brazil and South Africa; New South Wales records six new cases
Reaction has been coming today from Russian sources after Brazil’s health regulator said it was seeking further data on Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine before considering its approval for emergency use.
Documents supporting drugmaker Uniao Quimica’s application for emergency use of the vaccine have been returned to the company because they did not meet its minimum criteria, the watchdog said on Saturday.
While people over 75 living at home will be able to get vaccinated from Monday in France, there are concerns in the field that there are not enough doctors, Le Monde reports today.
Jacques Battistoni, president of MG France, a trade union for general practitioners, said: “We expect tensions and a difficult start to the week.”
Continue reading...Authorities in the Brazilian Amazon are reportedly racing to save dozens of premature babies after a surge in coronavirus cases caused a catastrophic breakdown in the oxygen supply to hospitals and clinics.
On Friday, CNN Brasil reported that the northern state of Amazonas was seeking to transfer at least 60 babies from neonatal units in its capital, Manaus, to hospitals elsewhere in the country.
Continue reading...Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he will personally refuse any Covid-19 vaccine, has cast doubt on the effectiveness and safety of a vaccination that will be rolled out in Brazil as the country's death toll passed 200,000 this week.
Manaus, the capital of Brazil's largest state, Amazonas, has been put under a daily 11-hour curfew as it faces a health system breakdown with oxygen shortages and thousands of deaths
Continue reading...Despite efforts to procure Covid vaccine, some nations will only vaccinate 20% of population
There are triumphant scenes as lorries leave a vaccine plant in Pune, India, loaded with boxes that will prevent thousands of deaths. Adar Poonawalla, the owner and chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, poses on the tailgate of a truck, making the most of his company’s “proud and historic” moment as the potential saviour of the nation – and even a large chunk of the world.
Poonawalla’s factory, the largest vaccine manufacturing complex in the world, is the best hope for immunisation for people in Africa and some low-income countries elsewhere – which could save them from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. The Serum Institute has been contracted to supply the UN-backed Covax initiative, which subsidises low-income countries, with 200m doses of Covid-19 vaccines with an option on 900m more.
Continue reading...Governor of Amazonas says situation critical as alarming details emerge about breakdown of health system in state capital Manaus
Health workers in Brazil’s largest state are begging for help and oxygen supplies after an explosion of Covid deaths and infections that one official compared to a tsunami and said could be linked to a new variant.
Continue reading...The human form has inspired artists for centuries for both its beauty and challenges. Now a Brazilian septuagenarian sculptor has won a surprise newfound notoriety for his celebrity waxworks. Six years after it was filmed, a local TV story on an exhibit by Arlindo Armacollo has gone viral for the distorted depictions and the gushing reporter's commentary. Armacollo's work is the latest in an increasingly long list of celebrity sculptures that have gained fame for not quite nailing the brief
Continue reading...Anonymous activist says he’s no ‘moral watchdog’ but vows to continue effort in hope of persuading revellers to stay home
Fuelled by black coffee, yellow-tipped cigarettes and white, incandescent rage, the faceless sleuth lurks on social media poised to unmask his next target.
“It’s outrageous, bizarre, it’s horrifying – a collective genocide,” fumed the twentysomething activist who burns the midnight oil scouring the internet for footage of parties being thrown despite a rapidly deteriorating Covid crisis that has killed more than 200,000 Brazilians.
Continue reading...BBC reporter Will Grant has produced an excellent look at the group of strongmen who came from left field
If there was ever a surreal start to a trip to Cuba, it was the one that coincided with the news Fidel Castro had died. That was what I woke up to on 26 November 2016, hours before my husband and I were due to fly to Havana. A day later, we found ourselves in what seemed like an endless queue under a blazing autumn sun, waiting to enter Castro’s memorial at the Jose Martí monument in the Plaza de la Revolución.
Related: Sisters in Hate review: tough but vital read on the rise of racist America
Continue reading...Workers on farms supplying world’s biggest meat firms allegedly paid £8 a day and housed in shacks with no toilets or running water
Brazilian companies and slaughterhouses including the world’s largest meat producer, JBS, sourced cattle from supplier farms that made use of workers kept in slavery-like conditions, according to a new report.
Workers on cattle farms supplying slaughterhouses earned as little as £8 a day and lived in improvised shacks with no bathrooms, toilets, running water or kitchens, according to a report from Brazilian investigative agency Repórter Brasil.
Since 1995, the report said, 55,000 Brazilian workers have been rescued by government inspectors from “situations similar to slavery”. While the number of investigations has fallen in recent years – 118 workers were freed in 2018, compared with 1,045 a decade earlier – that does not mean the situation has improved, just that inspections have been reduced, it noted.
Continue reading...Juliana Notari’s hillside sculpture sparks clash between Bolsonaro-supporting right and leftwing cultural community
A 33-metre reinforced concrete vagina has sparked a Bolsonarian backlash in Brazil, with supporters of the country’s far-right president clashing with leftwing art admirers over the installation.
The handmade sculpture, entitled Diva, was unveiled by visual artist Juliana Notari on Saturday at a rural art park on the grounds of a former sugar mill in Pernambuco, one of Brazil’s most culturally vibrant states.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s departure will alter the face of geopolitics. The climate crisis and Covid response will affect all nations – while others face very particular challenges. Observer correspondents examine the 12 months ahead
A potent mix of hope and fear accompanies the start of 2021 in most of the world. Scientists have created several vaccines for a disease that didn’t even have a name this time last year. But many countries, including the UK and the US, are still stumbling through the deadliest period of the pandemic.
The shadow of Covid will not begin to lift, even in richer countries, for months. Britain was the first to approve a vaccine and has secured extensive supplies, yet Boris Johnson’s suggestion that life might be returning to normal by Easter is widely seen as optimistic. Other countries, particularly in the south, face a long wait to get vaccines, and help paying for them. The rebuilding of economies shattered by Covid everywhere will be slow; even countries that managed to contain it have taken a hit, from Vietnam to New Zealand.
Continue reading...Seven years ago, she was nearly killed in pursuit of the sport she loves, but she defied expert’s predictions and made a stunning comeback
In the photographs of her record-breaking ride, the Brazilian surfer Maya Gabeira is a tiny blade on the water, cutting a line of white spume down the deep ridge of the vast grey wave that climbs behind her. The wave in question measured 22.4 metres (73.5ft), the highest ever surfed by a woman, the first to be measured and verified by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a couple of feet greater than the one surfed by her nearest rival. It is also the biggest wave measured this year, surfed by man or woman.
Gabeira, who broke her own previous Guinness world record of 68ft, attributes her achievement to what she calls “taking a critical line”. In short, she takes her board to the fiercest and tallest part of the wave, “where the most powerful energy is, where it is actually breaking”. This, she says, is how “you put value into your wave”.
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