BELO HORIZONTE (Brazil) – Prostitutes in the city here in southeast Brazil have gone on strike for a week, demanding that they be included in the group of front-line workers receiving priority Covid-19 vaccines.
Thousands of sex workers here have been forced by the pandemic-related closure of hotels – where they would rent rooms to sell their services – to solicit for clients on the streets, they said.
“We are on the front line, moving the economy, and we are at risk,” Cida Vieira, president of the Association of Prostitutes of Minas Gerais state, told AFP.
“We need to get vaccinated.”
Vieira and other women held a protest on Monday in a street lined with shuttered hotels where they used to ply their trade, waving placards declaring “Sex workers are professionals” and “Sex work and health”.
“We are part of the priority group because we deal with various types of people, and our lives are at risk,” said Lucimara Costa, one of the prostitutes at the protest.
The government has prioritised health workers, teachers, the elderly, indigenous people, and people with underlying health conditions for the first round of vaccinations.
It hopes to inoculate these groups, amounting to some 77 million individuals, in the first half the year, but experts said this may drag into September due to a shortage of doses.
“We are a priority group, we are health educators, peer educators. We form part of that group, since we give information about STIs to men, distribute condoms…,” said Vieira.
Like the rest of Brazil, Minas Gerais has been battling a second wave of the coronavirus, but the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, at 121, is among the lowest in the country.
The pandemic has claimed more than 332,000 lives in the nation, a toll second only to the United States. – AFP, April 7, 2021
