Rio de Janeiro, Jan. 8, 2020 – The Brazilian government will acquire 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Chinese laboratory Sinovac in 2021, Health Minister, Eduardo Pazuello, said.
The minister specified that the vaccine would be produced by Brazil’s Butantan Institute.
`On Thursday, we signed a contract with Butantan Institute to purchase first 46 million doses by April and 54 million doses throughout the year,” the minister said at a news conference.
He assured the citizens that all Sinovac vaccines already in the Butantan Institute would be used for the national immunization programme and distributed on an equitable and proportional basis among all Brazilian states.
According to Pazuello, Brazil also expects to receive 254 million doses of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca/Oxford University.
He said that these doses would be produced by Rio de Janeiro-based Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Similarly, Brazil’s COVID-19 case tally is nearing eight million, while the related death toll has topped 200,000, the health ministry said.
Over the past 24 hours, the South American country reported 1,524 coronavirus-related fatalities, taking the overall death toll to 200,498.
At the same time, Brazil confirmed 87,843 COVID-19 cases and the total reached 7,961,673.
To date, Brazil has registered more than seven million recoveries. (Sputnik/NAN)
