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SAO PAULO: Brazil’s decision to halt trials of a Covid-19 vaccine developed in China triggered a politically charged dispute on Tuesday when a senior health official expressed “outrage” and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro affirmed the ruling as a personal victory.
Brazilian health regulator Anvisa announced late Monday that it would suspend clinical trials for CoronaVac, developed by Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinovac Biotech, following a “serious adverse incident” that involved a volunteer in the study.
However, the public health center coordinating the trials in Brazil, the Butantan Institute, said there was no connection between the incident and the vaccine.
Privacy regulations prevent public health officials from revealing details about the incident, which was a setback for one of the most promising vaccines aimed at ending the pandemic.
But the coroner’s office that performed an autopsy on the deceased volunteer’s body told AFP that police were investigating the death as a suicide.
“There is no relation to the vaccine,” said Dimas Covas, director of the Butantan Institute, a respected public health center.
Anvisa’s decision, he told a press conference, “was a surprise … and it caused outrage here in Butantan.”
“We don’t even know if this patient took the vaccine or a placebo,” said the coordinator of the Sao Paulo state government’s Covid-19 working group, Joao Gabbardo.
Sinovac also said the incident was not related to CoronaVac, adding that he was “confident in the safety of the vaccine.”
Anvisa chief Antonio Barra Torres said in a separate press conference that the agency had made a “technical decision” based on “incomplete and insufficient data” from the Butantan Institute on the cause of the incident.
Vaccine Policy
CoronaVac has been embroiled in a complicated political battle in Brazil, where its most visible sponsor has been the governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria, a major opponent of Bolsonaro.
The president has endorsed another vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford in Great Britain and the British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca.
Bolsonaro and Doria have also argued over whether vaccination should be mandatory.
The president, who has criticized CoronaVac as “Joao Doria’s Chinese vaccine” and prevented the federal government from buying it, claimed the regulatory decision as vindication.
“Death, disability, malfunction. This is the vaccine that Doria wants to demand from all the inhabitants of Sao Paulo, ”Bolsonaro wrote on Facebook.
“The president said that this vaccine could never be mandatory. Score another victory for Jair Bolsonaro, ”he added.
The state of Sao Paulo has an agreement with Sinovac to buy 46 million doses of CoronaVac: six million produced in China and the rest produced in Sao Paulo, which started a factory last week to produce the vaccine in the country.
The Sinovac and Oxford vaccines are in phase 3 trials, the final stage before regulatory approval.
Both are being tested in Brazil, the country with the second highest death toll in the pandemic after the United States, with more than 162,000 deaths from the new coronavirus.
Brazil is also helping to carry out phase 3 trials of the vaccine developed by US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.
Pfizer said Monday that its vaccine had been 90% effective, sparking a wave of optimism around the world that the end of the pandemic could be within our grasp.
Bolsonaro faces criticism from experts for his handling of the pandemic, which has included downplaying the virus, opposing lockdown measures and relentlessly promoting the drug hydroxychloroquine even though studies show it to be ineffective against Covid-19.
Opponents harshly criticized what they called his politicized handling of Monday’s CoronaVac decision.
“Prison is too light a punishment for these scum who play politics with vaccines, which are the only way out of the greatest public health and socioeconomic crisis in history,” tweeted center-left politician Ciro Gomes, who ran against Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential elections.
