BRASILIA / SAO PAULO, January 17 (Reuters) – Brazilian health regulator Anvisa on Sunday opened an extraordinary meeting of its board of directors to decide whether to allow emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines from Sinovac Biotech in China and the British AstraZeneca to launch vaccines as pandemic enters a deadly second wave.
Anvisa’s decision will be a simple majority vote of the board’s five directors. The meeting started just after 10am local time (1300 GMT) and is expected to last around five hours.
President Jair Bolsonaro, a coronavirus skeleton who refused to take a vaccine himself, is under growing pressure to start inoculations in Brazil, which lost more than 200,000 to COVID-19 – the worst side death toll outside the United States. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/34pvUyi)
However, delays in vaccine behavior and test results have sustained vaccines in the country, once a global leader in mass vaccination and now a regional laggard after peers such as Chile and Mexico began giving out scenes for last month.
The Bolsonaro government had planned to start a national vaccination program this week but is still awaiting shipments of the AstraZeneca vaccine at the heart of its plans. That has added to public unrest and allowed a political rival to stand up for the right-wing president.
Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria, who heads the Butantan biochemical plant in partnership with Sinovac in Brazil, could start vaccinations in the state capital on Sunday if Anvisa permits emergency use of the photo Chinese, called CoronaVac, according to someone familiar with the plans. .
Bolsonaro, who sees Doria as a potential competitor for his 2022 re-election efforts, has ruled the governor over the effectiveness of CoronaVac’s 50% disappointment in tests Brazilian, but the federal Ministry of Health has agreed to get the picture for the national vaccination campaign.
Adding to the urgency for vaccinations, the second wave of the revolution in Brazil is snowballing as the country goes against a new, potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus that came from Amazonas and forced Britain and Italy to ban Brazilian.
Reporting with Eduardo Simoes in Sao Paulo, Pedro Fonseca in Rio de Janeiro, Jamie McGeever in Brasilia; Edited by Brad Haynes and Lisa Shumaker