Coronavirus: Brazil to use Chinese vaccine
Brazil intends to use a coronavirus vaccine developed in China as part of its national immunisation scheme, state officials have said.
The announcement about the Chinese-made “CoronaVac” vaccine came after state governors met with Brazil’s health minister on Tuesday.
The country of 230 million people has agreed to buy 46 million doses of it from the Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac, according to Joao Doria, the governor of Sao Paulo.
If it gains regulatory approval, CoronaVac will become one of two vaccines used in Brazil’s inoculation programme against the virus - the other being the one currently under development by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca in the UK.
The Butantan Institute, a research centre in the state of Sao Paulo which is running a large-scale trial of CoronaVac with 9,000 volunteers, said on Monday that the vaccine was safe.
Although preliminary, it was the first result to come out of any of Sinovac’s global late-phase trials, which are also taking place in Indonesia and Turkey.
Dimas Covas, the director of the Butantan Institute, added that details about CoronaVac’s effectiveness would not be made public until the trial ended.
The Sao Paulo government has already asked health regulators to approve the vaccine for use, with Mr Doria saying the country could possibly roll out mass vaccinations from as early as January next year.
Brazil has been badly affected by Covid-19 and has so far recorded 5,273,954 and 154,837 deaths from the virus, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Only the US has had more Covid-19 deaths than Brazil, with 220,171.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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