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NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) — One foreign dignitary visiting the United States received a less-than hospitable reception in the Big Apple this week, as shown by a photo of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro eating a slice of pizza on a New York sidewalk because the city’s vaccination rules forbade him from entry.

Bolsonaro was in America for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, the Daily Mail reports. A viral photo depicts him and his entourage enjoying an informal meal outside due to his lack of a vaccine passport as required by Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rules for indoor establishments such as restaurants.

While his official status is confidential, Bolsonaro says he is unvaccinated against COVID-19. He contracted the virus last year, describing it as a “little flu” and citing his past athletic experience for the mildness of his symptoms. A body of research indicates that post-infection immunity is actually more protective against reinfection than vaccinated immunity, which vaccine advocates are trying to compensate for by promoting booster shots at shortening intervals.

Nevertheless, U.S. “vaccine passport” policies tend not to recognize natural immunity as an alternative to vaccination.

On Monday, Bolsonaro reportedly laughed and said “not me” when encouraged to take the AstraZeneca COVID shot by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. One member of Bolsonaro’s delegation, who arrived a week before the president, tested positive for COVID-19 and was quarantined in a New York hotel.

U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Friday that the Biden administration was “concerned about the U.N. event being a superspreader event, and that we need to take all measures to ensure that it does not become a superspreader event.”

Around the world, many continue to harbor concerns that the COVID vaccines have not been sufficiently studied for negative effects given their accelerated clinical trials. Vaccine defenders note that the one-year development period was not starting from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece. 

While cases of severe harm reported to VAERS after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of underreporting, the VAERS website offers simply that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).

In May, NBC News published a report acknowledging experts’ concerns about “gaps” in federal monitoring of the COVID vaccines. While the government currently relies on a “hodgepodge” of sources for safety data, the report explained, the quoted experts call for a more “robust ‘active’ surveillance system [that] can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.”

Such concerns were intensified Monday by a Project Veritas report showing insiders at Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a federal facility, speaking candidly about serious medical complications they’ve seen after COVID vaccination that are not being reported. Acknowledging the COVID vaccines’ potential dangers would severely undermine the Biden administration’s heavy investment in the idea that the vaccines are the key to ending the pandemic.

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.