RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – A first shipment of 88 liters of active ingredients for the production of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine in Brazil arrived from China on Saturday, an essential input to accelerate the country’s troubled vaccination program.
With these supplies transported to Rio de Janeiro on a cargo plane, Fiocruz’s biomedical center can begin to fill and finish 2.8 million doses. The federally funded center hopes to receive more ingredients this month, to make a total of 15 million vaccines developed with the University of Oxford.
Fiocruz’s production line, initially scheduled to start production in December, was stopped due to the delay in the first shipment of supplies from China.
The AstraZeneca Plc vaccine is the central pillar of Brazil’s national inoculation program and the federal government has ordered material for Fiocruz to make up to 100 million vaccines.
To start inoculating its 210 million inhabitants, Brazil initially relied on the Chinese vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd and 2 million ready-to-use AstraZeneca vaccines imported from India last month.
Pfizer Inc on Friday requested full regulatory approval in Brazil for its COVID-19 vaccine developed with BioNTech Se, the company said.
It is the second vaccine to be registered in Brazil. On January 29, AstraZeneca applied for full regulatory approval for its vaccine.
President Jair Bolsonaro, who says he will not take any COVID-19 injections, is under pressure after a slow and irregular launch of the vaccine in Brazil, which now faces a second wave of infections.
Bolsonaro referred to the virus as a “small flu”, but his government faces growing criticism over the management of the world’s second deadliest coronavirus outbreak, which killed more than 231,000 Brazilians.
The biomedical institute Butantan of São Paulo said on Saturday that it started filling and finishing 8.6 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine, called Coronavac, with ingredients that arrived from China on Wednesday.
Butantan said it expects to receive another supply of ingredients on Wednesday to make another 8.7 million doses.
Reporting by Sergio Queiroz, screenplay by Anthony Boadle; Editing by David Gregorio