RÍO DE JANEIRO.- Facebook and Instagram removed from their platforms a live broadcast of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in which he assured that people in the United Kingdom who have received two doses of the coronavirus vaccine are developing AIDS faster than expected.
Facebook’s press office confirmed in an email statement to The Associated Press that the content was removed Sunday night because it violated the social network’s policy on COVID-19 vaccines.
“Our policies do not allow claims that COVID-19 vaccines kill or seriously affect people,” the statement said.
The company did not respond to questions from the AP about why it took three days before the highly criticized content was removed or whether language barriers played a role, given that Bolsonaro made his comments in Portuguese.
The claim has been one of the strangest the president, who contracted coronavirus last year and remains unvaccinated, has made about immunization against COVID-19 to date.
The president has spent months sowing doubts about vaccines, especially the one produced by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac. He also warned the Brazilian population that there will be no legal recourse against Pfizer for those who have side effects from the coronavirus vaccine, and even joked that this includes women who grow beards or people who turn into alligators.
On Monday, during a radio interview, Bolsonaro rejected criticism against him for spreading false information about AIDS, and claimed that he had simply read an article published in October last year in Brazil.
In fact, the media published a loosely related article that concerned only the type of vaccine in the Russian Sputnik injection against the coronavirus, the use of which is not authorized in Brazil, according to the information verification service Aos Fatos.
– .
