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The President of Brazil, Jair bolsonaro, said on Wednesday that it ordered to cancel the agreement announced on Tuesday by the Ministry of Health to acquire millions of doses of the Chinese vaccine CoronaVac, in the middle of a dispute with one of his great political adversaries, the governor of Sao Paulo.
“I already ordered cancel [el acuerdo], the president is me, I do not renounce my authority, because I would be buying a vaccine that nobody is interested in “he told reporters at an event in Sao Paulo.
Earlier, on Facebook, the far-right president warned that “the Brazilian people will not be anyone’s guinea pig.”
“Any vaccine, before being available to the population, must be scientifically proven by the Ministry of Health and certified by Anvisa [Agencia de Vigilancia Sanitaria]Bolsonaro wrote.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello announced after a meeting with the country’s 27 governors that the federal government had reached an agreement with the state of Sao Paulo, which is helping to test and produce the vaccine, to buy 46 Millions of doses with the aim of being administered from January if their safety and effectiveness are verified.
But on Wednesday, the ministry explained in a statement that Pazuello’s words had been “misinterpreted”, specifying that there was no firm “commitment” to acquire vaccines, but only a “protocol of intention”.
The vaccine in question, CoronaVac, developed by the Chinese private laboratory Sinovac, has been tested in phase III – the final phase – in thousands of volunteers in six states of the country, including Sao Paulo, the most affected by the pandemic.
The vaccine will be produced in Brazil by the Butantan Institute, a public body under the supervision of the state of Sao Paulo, governed by Joao Doria, a political opponent of Jair Bolsonaro.
In his Facebook post on Wednesday, the president referred to the initiative as “Joao Doria’s Chinese vaccine.”
The governor of the richest and most populated state in the country, visiting Brasilia, responded: “The Butantan vaccine is the vaccine of Brazil, of all Brazilians. We do not evaluate vaccines according to political or ideological criteria ”.
The day before, Minister Pazuello had also described it as “Brazil’s vaccine”, recalling that the Latin American country of 212 million inhabitants is also in phase III trials with the vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca with the University of Oxford.
Brazil is the second country with the most deaths from the new coronavirus, with almost 155,000, behind the United States.
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