Covid-19, the anti-vaccine movement and immunization challenges in Brazil: a review

AIMS: The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly and significantly increased hospitalizations for pneumonia with systemic inflammatory disease. Since its appearance, COVID-19 has affected more than 200 countries, with more than 90 million cases and almost 2 million deaths. So far, there is no quality evidence regarding the specific pharmacological therapy for COVID-19; most treatments usually involve off-label use of existing drugs and have unproven efficacy. The global effort converges on the development of a vaccine; however, the greatest challenge is to achieve collective immunization in the face of increasing vaccination hesitancy. METHODS: This study investigated the impact of vaccine hesitancy movements on the goal of COVID-19 immunization in Brazil. An integrative bibliographic review was performed with an electronic search on PubMed and SciELO that yielded 13.535 articles. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied which included 29 interventional and descriptive studies. RESULTS: The results of the 29 studies revealed that the most frequent reasons for hesitation is skepticism about the true interests of the industry and politicians, the lack of trust in research, and inaccurate information on social media. CONCLUSION: The main factors that lead the population not to believe in vaccines were the real interests of industry and politicians, lack of confidence in research, and the amount of false information that circulates massively on social media and because of that it is possible that Brazil will face some challenges in achieving collective immunity due to the anti-vaccine movement.