LOS ANGELES—Sex workers in Brazil’s sixth-largest city are on strike this week, demanding that the government classify them as “front-line workers,” and as a result, give them priority for receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a report by the French Press Agency. Sex work is legalized in Brazil and since 2002, the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment has classified it as an officially recognized profession.
That official recognition allows “sex professionals” to access public benefits, such as social security. But that doesn’t mean life is easy for Brazilian sex workers. Many activities surrounding the legal exchange of sex for payment, such as living off the income generated by someone else’s sex work, have an ambiguous legal status at best. That has led to a system in which the government is able to impose restrictions and regulations on sex worker activity, often through the actions of law enforcement, according to a 2017 United Nations report.
As they have throughout South America and the world, sex workers in Brazil were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. And Brazil as a country has struggled with the pandemic, just Thursday seeing more than 4,000 deaths in a single day.
Now, sex workers in the city of Belo Horizonte say that they need to be vaccinated as quickly as possible, because they are working on the front lines of the pandemic, mostly on the streets since being forced out of their rented hotel rooms due to widespread hotel closures.
"We are in the front line, moving the economy and we are at risk," Association of Prostitutes of Minas Gerais State President Cida Vieira told AFP. "We need to get vaccinated. We are a priority group, we are health educators, peer educators. We form part of that group, since we give information about STIs for men, and distribute condoms."
The Brazilian government has also struggled with getting vaccines to Brazilians. As of late March, only 10 million of the country’s more than 220 million people — about 4.5 percent — had received at least one dose of a vaccine. That number pales next to the achievement of another South American country, Chile, where 37.7 percent of the population has received at least one dose, and 22.4 percent are fully vaccinated.
In the United States, as of April 8, 33.7 percent have been partially vaccinated, at 19.9 percent had received full vaccination doses.
Health workers, teachers, the elderly, indigenous people and people with underlying health conditions have received top priority for vaccination in Brazil, but sex workers now say they should be included in that group and they are withholding their services for at kleast a week to make their point.
Brazil’s handling of the pandemic has been particularly lacking, with President Jair Bolsonaro consistently refusing to take decisive actions to curb spread of the novel coronavirus, deriding the disease that has killed nearly 350,000 Brazilians as “just a little flu,” publicly declaring that he refuses to be vaccinated, baselessly casting doubt on the vaccine’s effectiveness, and declining multiple opportunities to purchase millions of vaccine doses to distribute to his country’s people.
Photo By Wilfredor / Wikimedia Commons
