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Jair Bolsonaro said his government will not buy China’s Sinovac vaccine against Covid
Brasilia:
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Wednesday that his government will not buy China’s Sinovac vaccine against COVID-19, a day after the Health Minister said it would be included in the country’s immunization program.
“Of course, we will not buy the Chinese vaccine,” Bolsonaro said on social media, responding to a supporter who urged him not to buy the vaccine. The president said the issue would be cleared up later that day.
On Tuesday, Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello told a meeting with state governors that the ministry would purchase the vaccine developed by Sinovac to include in the immunization program, in addition to the one developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
The São Paulo state biomedical research center Instituto Butantan is testing the Sinovac vaccine, and Governor João Doria said he hopes to have approval from the health regulator before the end of the year to begin vaccinating people in January. .
Doria said after the Health Ministry meeting that the federal government agreed to buy 46 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine.
Including the vaccine, called CoronaVac, in the national vaccination program of a nation of 230 million people would be a huge success for Sinovac in what could be one of the first coronavirus immunization efforts in the world.
The Brazilian government already has plans to buy the vaccine from the UK and produce it at its FioCruz biomedical research center in Rio de Janeiro.
The Butantan Institute said Monday that preliminary results of CoronaVac late-stage clinical trials in 9,000 volunteers have shown that the Chinese two-dose vaccine is safe. Butantan director Dimas Covas said data on the efficacy of the vaccine will not be released until the trials are completed.
So far, the results are only preliminary and the researchers will continue to monitor the participants, Covas said. It is the first set of results from Sinovac’s global phase 3 tests, which are also taking place in Turkey and Indonesia.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed)
