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This Monday, the Brazilian government appointed veterinarian Laurício Monteiro Cruz as the new director of the Department of Immunizations and Communicable Diseases of the Ministry of Health, leading the discussions on the vaccination strategy against covid-19.
The appointment was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation and was signed by the Acting Minister of Health of Brazil, General Eduardo Pazuello.
The department that Monteiro Cruz will assume is now responsible for Brazil’s National Immunization Program, including vaccination campaigns and the distribution of immunizers throughout Brazil, a key element in the fight against the covid-19 pandemic.
The new director chairs the Regional Council of Veterinary Medicine of the Federal District, which includes the capital, Brasilia, and has been dependent on the Health Department of that district government since 1989, according to the Lattes Platform, which compiles the curricula of Brazilian researchers .
Monteiro Cruz has a master’s degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Brasilia and specialized in health surveillance, specializing in visceral leishmaniasis in dogs.
The appointment of the veterinarian Cruz was questioned by the former Secretary of Health Surveillance, Wanderson Oliveira.
“Nothing against vets, but this person they put in to coordinate the National Immunization Program is a vet with no experience in immunizations. It is unfortunate that we are seeing this dismantling of the Health Surveillance Secretariat, ”Oliveira was quoted as saying by the newspaper. Newspaper.
Monteiro Cruz will take the place of Marcelo Wada, also a graduate in Veterinary Medicine, but with a master’s degree in collective health and who was a career employee at the Ministry of Health. He also specialized in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, in the United States, one of the largest academic references in the study of the covid-19 pandemic.
Brazil has a total of 120,828 fatalities and 3,862,311 cases of contagion by the new coronavirus, being the second country in the world with the highest number of infected and dead, only behind the United States of America.
With around 212 million inhabitants and a high number of cases, the South American country is considered an ideal laboratory to test various potential vaccines, and pharmaceutical companies are now looking to verify their effectiveness and safety.
Two weeks ago, the Sanitary Surveillance Agency (Anvisa), a body under the supervision of the Ministry of Health, approved the start of clinical trials in Brazil of a new vaccine against covid-19, the fourth to be tested in the country against the virus.
The multinational Johnson & Johnson received authorization to test its vaccine in phase three clinical studies (with thousands of people), which is already being done in Brazil with immunizers developed by the United Kingdom (AstraZeneca and University of Oxford), China (Sinovac Biotech), and by the BioNTech (Germany) and Wyeth / Pfizer (United States) consortium.
Last week, the Government of the Brazilian state of Paraná informed that it must present to Anvisa, within the next 30 days, the validation protocol for phase three of clinical studies of the Russian vaccine in the country.
