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The pharmaceutical company Pfizer has already sold to Latin America almost 60 million doses of the vaccine against Covid-19 that it develops in partnership with the German biotechnology company BioNTech. Although none of the buying countries has approved immunization so far, the UK was the only country to do so, the first doses start to be delivered in December and vaccination campaigns may start in January in some places.
The doses sold to Mexico, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica and Ecuador total, so far, 59.4 million, according to information from press vehicles and ministries of health in each of these countries. Two doses are required to immunize a person, applied with a few days between them.
In a statement, Pfizer says the number of doses available for distribution has dropped considerably due to global interest in the vaccine. The company states that the production capacity is 50 million doses still in 2020 and 1,300 million units during the year 2021.
Advance purchases of immunizing doses from the European Union (300 million), the United Kingdom (40 million), Japan (120 million) and Latin America (59.4 million) total almost 520 million units to date. sold of the product. The United States made an advance purchase of 100 million doses, with the possibility of acquiring an additional 500 million units.
Therefore, if one considers the additional acquisition that the United States can still make, Pfizer would have already committed almost 85% of the global production of the immunizer in 2020 and 2021.
The Pfizer vaccine was first approved by a regulatory agency on Wednesday (2) in the UK. The nation says that vaccination of priority population groups, the people most vulnerable to Covid-19, begins next week. This was the first registration in the world for a vaccine against the disease following the usual protocols, after the completion of the third phase of human trials.
On November 18, Pfizer announced that Phase 3 testing was completed and preliminary results indicated that the immunizer is 95% effective. The data placed the vaccine among the most promising in development. However, the results have not yet been published in any scientific journal.
Pressure on the Brazilian government has increased in recent days. The company says it has submitted a proposal and is awaiting an official position. “But the deadline expires in a few days,” he tells Pfizer, without giving a final date for a response.
According to the company, the proposal would allow millions of Brazilians to be immunized in the first half of 2021, after Anvisa (the National Health Surveillance Agency) granted a registration to the vaccine. Pfizer does not say how many doses it offered to the Brazilian government.
In the last week, the company initiated the request for authorization of use by Anvisa through the process of continuous sending of information.
One of the main resistances of the Ministry of Health to acquire the Pfizer / BioNTech immunizer is due to the logistics that the product requires, which needs to be stored at a temperature of -70ºC. On Tuesday (1), the folder reported that the vaccines to be included in the National Immunization Plan must be thermostable and can be stored at temperatures of 2 ° C to 8 ° C – common refrigerator temperatures -, which would make the use from Pfizer and also American Modern candidates, which should be kept at -20ºC.
Pfizer says it has sent the ministry some proposals for possible distribution and vaccination schemes that would be viable for Brazil. According to the company, a box was developed that allows the product to be stored on dry ice at a temperature of -75ºC for 15 days. The term would be enough to take the immunizer to the extremes of the country. The vaccine can stay at normal refrigerator temperature for up to five days.
To date, the federal government has an agreement to purchase and produce 100 million doses of the vaccine produced by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. The amount would be enough to vaccinate 50 million people, just under 25% of the population. Another 10% of Brazilians (about 20 million people) could receive doses sent by the international Covax coalition, of which Brazil is a part.
The state of São Paulo signed a contract to receive 60 million units of Coronavac, produced by China’s Sinovac, by 2021. The amount would be enough to immunize almost 70% of the state’s population.
Brazilian scientists said that the low temperature required by the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine should not be a barrier to its distribution, in view of the public health emergency caused by the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes Covid-19.
“It is possible to find simple and quick solutions to try not to exclude the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. But that would depend on the interest of the institutions, which would have to dialogue with each other. From a physics point of view, it is something relatively simple to do. “. , says Milton Tumelero, professor at the Institute of Physics of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), a specialist in cryogenics, an area of physics that studies the phenomena of low temperatures, which reach -200ºC.
According to the scientist, there is already a network of cryogenics laboratories by the country’s public universities, and the federal government could call on researchers to create solutions and supply inputs, such as dry ice and liquid nitrogen, which are used to conserve materials at extremely low temperatures. “My laboratory focused on providing inputs to other units of the university is practically stopped at the moment,” says Tumelero.
Public and collective health experts say several different types of vaccines will be needed to stop the pandemic in the country. Therefore, the proof of immunizations showing potential cannot be ruled out. In a statement published on Friday (4), the Brazilian Association of Collective Health (Abrasco) called the plan for a national immunization campaign presented this week by the Ministry of Health “anemic”.
Without giving many details, the folder said that the vaccination against Covid-19 will begin in March 2021 with health professionals, over 75 years old and indigenous people. In Europe, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy they begin their campaigns until January 2021. Latin American countries such as Mexico and Argentina already plan to begin vaccination also in January.
