Jair Bolsonaro said his government would not buy Chinese Sinovac vaccine against Covid
Brasilia:
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Wednesday his government would not buy China’s Sinovac vaccine against COVID-19, a day after the health minister said it would be included in the country’s vaccination program.
“Of course, we won’t 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 matter would be clarified later today.
Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello said on Tuesday in a meeting with state governors that the ministry would purchase the vaccine developed by Sinovac to include it in the vaccination program, in addition to that developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
Sao Paulo’s state biomedical research center, the Butantan Institute, is testing the Sinovac vaccine, and Governor João Doria has said he hopes to get approval from the health regulator by the end of the year. year to start vaccinating people in January.
Doria said after the Health Department meeting that the federal government had agreed to purchase 46 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine.
Inclusion of the vaccine, called CoronaVac, in the national immunization program for a nation of 230 million people would be a major achievement for Sinovac in what could be one of the world‘s first coronavirus vaccination efforts.
The Brazilian government is already considering purchasing the British vaccine and producing it at its FioCruz biomedical research center in Rio de Janeiro,
The Butantan Institute said on Monday that preliminary results from advanced clinical trials of CoronaVac in 9,000 volunteers have proven the Chinese two-dose vaccine to be safe. Butantan director Dimas Covas said data on the vaccine’s effectiveness will not be released until the trials are completed.
The results are only preliminary at this time, and researchers will continue to monitor participants, Covas said. This is the first set of results from the global phase 3 trials of Sinovac, which are also being conducted in Turkey and Indonesia.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
