Introduction: A Call to Engage with Denial

Cruz was appointed as head of the General Directorate of Public Health in 1903, at a time when yellow fever had killed a thousand people in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone the previous year. The newspaper printed a portrait of a man suffering from a grisly tumor in late October 1904 and claimed that vaccines caused his ailment.8 The newspaper explained that vaccines were the, "monster that pollutes the pure and innocent blood of our children with the vile excretions expelled from sick animals, of a nature that contaminates the system of any living being. "9 This newspaper article argued that it was providing the public with the "information" it needed to evaluate the government's mandates.10 It is an example of coordinated efforts to spread mis/disinformation by the press as part of the effort to create a public campaign against Alves' public health policy. Uprisings, which were also taking place in the industrial workers' neighborhoods and the Afro-Brazilian districts with fierce hand-to-hand combat, were eventually put down and citizens were pressured to retreat by the army advancing by land and the threat of bombardment by the navy docked just offshore.11 The state used repressive measures (imprisonment, beatings, interrogation, and internal exile) and put the instigators, including Senator Lauro Sodré and military officers, on trial following the uprising.12 The government declared a "state of siege" and the uprising was controlled in three days.13 However, although the government had survived the assault, the Alves administration was forced to abandon its vaccine mandate and smallpox continued to plague the country for several more years, slowing plans to modernize.