WHO Grants First Emergency Approval for Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine | Coronavirus

“It is a very positive step to guarantee universal access to vaccines against Covid-19,” said Mariangela Simão, director responsible for access to medicines at the WHO.

• 91-year-old British woman who was the first to receive the Pfizer vaccine

The validation also allows the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to purchase the vaccine to distribute it to countries that need it.

According to the WHO, the experts gathered by the entity concluded that the “vaccine met the mandatory criteria for safety and efficacy.”

Situation of the Pfizer vaccine in Brazil

The National Sanitary Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) and Pfizer held a meeting on Wednesday (30) to discuss the request for emergency use of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Previously, the US pharmaceutical company had published a note in which it said that it would not enter, at least for now, the request for emergency use in Brazil. The reason would be additional demands by the country: “specific analyzes” that should be included in the documentation. This, according to Pfizer, would slow down the process.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been used for several weeks in the United Kingdom, as well as in the European Union, the United States and Switzerland, among other countries.

Several million people have already been vaccinated with the immunizer, with an estimated effectiveness of 95%, but which requires very low storage temperatures, -70 ° C, which makes its distribution difficult.

The following video shows how the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine works, which uses a technology called messenger RNA, different from the others. The vaccine brings a copy of part of the genetic code of the virus to our body, a kind of recipe for our body to produce a protein from the virus. The presence of this protein triggers the production of antibodies.

See VIDEOS with news about vaccines against Covid-19