São Paulo decrees compulsory Covid-19 vaccination for city employees

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The mayor of São Paulo, Ricardo Nunes, decreed this Saturday (7) the compulsory vaccination against Covid-19 for all employees of the city, the most populous in Brazil and one of the hardest hit by the pandemic.

The measure affects all public employees of the São Paulo capital’s administration, including those working in foundations and entities linked to the local govenment.

Civil servants who, without a justified cause, refuse to take the covid vaccine will commit a serious disciplinary offense and will be subject to the sanctions outlined in the law.

Nunes argued in his decision that the rights to life and health contemplated in the Brazilian Constitution “must prevail” over “freedom of conscience and individual philosophical conviction”.

He also cited a precautionary decision of the Supreme Court issued last December 17. The high court endorsed the obligatory nature of the vaccine against Covid-19 and allowed states and municipalities to punish those who choose not to take it.

In this context, the mayor announced that the Office of the Comptroller General of São Paulo would be in charge of finding out which officials, without just cause, “did not get vaccinated” to, from there, “adopt the pertinent legal and regulatory actions”.

São Paulo, which has some 12 million inhabitants, has reported more than 910,000 positives and almost 36,000 deaths related to Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, with a case fatality rate of 3.9%, according to the latest official data.

Those numbers position the capital of the state of Sao Paulo as one of the Brazilian cities hardest hit by SARS-CoV-2.

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