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The president of the Butantan Institute, responsible in Brazil for the only vaccine against the new coronavirus used so far in the country, asked President Jair Bolsonaro this Tuesday (19) to “have the dignity” to help expedite the shipment of supplies for immunizer. from China.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly criticized the vaccine promoted by the governor of São Paulo, João Doria (one of his main political opponents), and manufactured in China, a country from which the US-aligned president Donald Trump sought to keep his distance.
Despite this, the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) authorized on Sunday the emergency use of CoronaVac, a vaccine produced by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac in collaboration with Butantan, subordinate to the state of São Paulo, as well as the British immunizer AstraZenevca / University of São Paulo. Oxford, developed in cooperation with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), linked to the Ministry of Health, which has not yet arrived in Brazil.
Immunization began with the distribution of six million doses of CoronaVac and Butantan requested authorization for another 4.8 million doses, reserved for risk groups, such as the elderly, health professionals and indigenous communities.
And now there is uncertainty about what will happen when the doses are exhausted in the country of 211.8 million inhabitants and that adds up to more than 211 thousand deaths from the pandemic.
Trying to regain ground against Doria, Bolsonaro proclaimed this Monday that “the vaccine is from Brazil, not from any governor.”
The president of Butantan, Dimas Covas, took the statement at face value.
“If the vaccine is now from Brazil, our president has the dignity to defend it and even request the support of his Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the conversation with the government of China,” said Covas in Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of São Paulo.
The Butantan Institute has an agreement with the Sinovac laboratory to receive a sufficient quantity of the main vaccine input, called IFA, to manufacture 40 million doses of CoronaVac, the Institute told AFP.
That shipment is only pending authorization from the Chinese government, he added.
Brazil also expects the arrival of 2 million doses of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine from India, where it is manufactured. The Brazilian government had announced that the cargo would arrive last week, but the Asian country did not authorize the shipment and at the moment there is no date for the transport.
After importing these doses, Fiocruz plans to start manufacturing this vaccine in Brazil, but the supplies, which are also imported from China, face the same delay in reaching the country and this could affect the schedule, the institution said Tuesday.
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