The COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Brazil is an ongoing mass immunization campaign for the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. It started on January 17, 2021, when the country had 210 thousand deaths.
The Instituto Butantan imported the first 6 million doses of CoronaVac in a collaboration with the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech.
There is no deadline forecast for immunizing the country's entire population due to the lack of supplies for vaccine production and also due to political disputes between the São Paulo state government and the Jair Bolsonaro government.
According to a June 2022 study published in The Lancet, COVID-19 vaccination in Brazil prevented an additional 1 million deaths from December 8, 2020, to December 8, 2021.
Background
Before the Butantan vaccine, Fiocruz sought permission from the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) to import the vaccine. It would be more than two million doses of the vaccines developed by Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Anvisa approved, on January 17, 2021, the emergency use of the vaccine in Brazil. On January 22, 2021, after an obstacle between the Indian and Brazilian governments, Brazil received another two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. On the same day, Anvisa approved another 4.8 million doses of the CoronaVac vaccine for emergency use.
Initial deployment
Soon after the vaccines were approved for emergency use, the government of São Paulo held a press conference to perform the first application. Nurse Mônica Calazans was the first person outside the clinical trials to be vaccinated against COVID in the country.
The vaccination campaign throughout the country would have started on January 18, 2021, at 5 pm (UTC-3), however, due to logistical problems, part of the states postponed it to the 19th, since the vaccines would only arrive at night. The states that started vaccination on the 18th were São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Paraná, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Maranhão, Tocantins, Mato Grosso do Sul, Ceará, Goiás, Piauí, and Santa Catarina. Mostly nursing technicians, nurses, blacks, and women were responsible for opening the vaccination campaign in the states.
In the artistic world, the actresses Zezé Motta and Solange Couto became the first personalities to be vaccinated. The social worker and nursing technician, Vanuzia Costa, from the multiethnic village Sons of this Earth, was the first one vaccinated among the indigenous people.
On January 23, 2021, in a symbolic act, vaccination was started in Brazil with the Oxford immunizer. The first person to receive the vaccine was the infectologist Estevão Portela. At the same occasion the pneumologist Margareth Dalcolmo was also vaccinated. Doctor Sarah Ananda Gomes was the third to be vaccinated. Soon after, seven more health professionals were immunized.
Timeline and goals
On February 17, 2021, the then Minister of Health, Eduardo Pazuello, in a meeting with governors, presented a schedule about vaccination in Brazil. He stated that between February and July 2021, an additional 230.7 million doses of vaccines against COVID-19 will be distributed.
On March 3, 2021, the Ministry of Health published in the Official Gazette a decree that mentioned the exemption of bidding in the acquisition of 38 million vaccines from Janssen (pharmaceutical branch of Johnson & Johnson group) and 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. So far, the vaccines approved for definitive use in the country are the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. The Butantan/Sinovac and Janssen vaccines, on the other hand, are only authorized for emergency use and are intended for priority groups. Negotiations between Brazil and Pfizer/BioNtech began in the second half of 2020, but did not move forward due to the Brazilian government's refusal to accept a contractual clause exempting the pharmaceutical company from bearing the costs of possible side effects of the vaccine.