Mother and daughter united: hug for first vaccine test person

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Mother and daughter united
Hug for first female vaccine subject

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Yes, there are: the beautiful, heartwarming stories of the Corona crisis. While she was the first volunteer to take part in a vaccine study, Brazilian Denise Abranches was unable to meet her 74-year-old mother for months. Then she travels 600 kilometers across the country – for a long-awaited hug.

After almost a year and a half without personal contact, the first volunteer test person for a corona vaccine in Brazil met her mother again. Denise Abranches traveled more than 600 kilometers to meet again on Mother’s Day from São Paulo to Araguari in the state of Minas Gerais, as the Brazilian news portal “G1” reported. “I just wanted a hug,” Abranches said. “At least a day with her. For me it was absolutely necessary for everything I’ve been through.”

Abranches, who heads the dental department at Hospital São Paulo and, as a dental surgeon, cleans the mouths of corona patients so that there is no additional risk of infection, took part in a phase III study for the Astrazeneca vaccine in Brazil last year. Thousands of volunteers from the health sector and other areas in which one is increasingly exposed to the coronavirus who had not yet become infected, like the 47-year-old, received a vaccination last year, for example from Astrazeneca or the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac, or an ineffective agent for control values ​​for comparison.

Brazil had become the world’s test laboratory. For months, Abranches was almost exclusively between the hospital and home, the daily fight against the virus is her everyday life. Six months after taking the test, Abranches learned that she had been given an ineffective control agent for comparison and not the drug.

From January onwards, as part of the nationwide vaccination campaign, first Denise Abranches and then her 74-year-old mother Maria Vilma Pinto were vaccinated. According to their own statements, the two had only talked via video calls since Christmas 2019.

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