Coronavirus: Brazil begins vaccinating entire city for unpublished study

SERRANA.-A small town in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo started this Wednesday vaccinate your entire population of the legal age in the context of an unprecedented clinical study to analyze the impact of vaccination on the control of the new pandemic coronavirus.

The ambitious Projects should apply in two months the two doses of vaccine 30,000 of the 50,000 inhabitants of Serrana, a city 300 km from the capital of São Paulo. The initiative is coordinated by the Butantan Institute, a vaccine research and production center linked to the São Paulo government.

For their execution, they were intended 60,000 doses of CoronaVac vaccine, developed by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, with which the most populous state in Brazil began vaccination in January this year.

“It’s not just a mass vaccination. The study aims see the effectiveness of vaccination in a community and with that, to identify to what extent individual vaccination has a collective effect, ”said Ricardo Palacios, director of clinical studies at the Butantan Institute.

Health officials hope the study, in which more than 500 people are working and expected to be extended by a year and a half, will identify the flow of the virus transmission rate in a vaccinated population, the behavior in the face of the news. variants of Covid -19, the number of people who must be vaccinated to disrupt the circulation of the virus and the economic impact of this strategy.

“This is an unprecedented study in the world,” said the Governor of San Pablo, Joao Doria, at a press conference that preceded the start of vaccination on Wednesday morning. The city has been divided into four sectors and vaccination will take place over the next eight weeks in eight schools in the municipality.

Pregnant and breastfeeding women, people with serious illnesses and minors are excluded from the study. Dimas Covas, director of the Butantan Institute, explained at the press conference that Serrana had been chosen for this study, which involves First experience of mass vaccination in Brazil, because it is a small town, has a good hospital structure, is close to a research center and because of its high incidence rate of covid-19.

Serrana has a rate of 5,248 infections per 100,000 inhabitants, currently the highest rate among municipalities in São Paulo, Covas said.

Since the start of the pandemic a year ago, this city has recorded 2,367 cases. Brazil is already registering more than 240,000 deaths and nearly 10 million infections. In just over a month, more than 5.5 million Brazilians (2.6% of the country) were immunized with CoronaVac and the vaccine developed by Astrazeneca and Oxford.

AFP and ANSA agencies

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