in one day, all adults in a city were vaccinated against the coronavirus

Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic in the world, vaccinated this Sunday against covid-19 A all the adults in a city of 150,000 inhabitants as part of an unprecedented study that could provide global benchmarks on the effectiveness of mass vaccination.

The project, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and which has received the endorsement of the World Health Organization (WHO), Botucatu, a medium-sized city within the Brazilian state of São Paulo, in a global laboratory for a “real-life study” of covid-19 vaccination.

The project managers have set themselves the goal of vaccinating some 80,000 people aged 18 to 60, which correspond to just over 80% of the 106,000 adults of Botucatu, a city 237 kilometers from São Paulo, the largest Brazilian city, and home to major universities.

As people over the age of 60 had already been vaccinated during the national vaccination campaign which began on January 18, it is expected that at least the 90% of all adults in town are vaccinated by the end of this Sunday.

The campaign is part of a study promoted by the Ministry of Health and Paulista State University (Unesp) to study the effectiveness of mass vaccination with the vaccine jointly developed by the laboratory AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, who also joined the experience.

The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation also promotes the experiment, linked to the Ministry of Health, the largest medical research center in Latin America and which has the license to manufacture 210 million doses of the Oxford vaccine in Brazil.

In this phase four study, in addition to testing the ability of the Oxford vaccine to reduce cases, hospitalizations and deaths due to covid-19, it is planned to analyze the effectiveness of mass vaccination and that of l ‘immunizer against it.as new variants of the coronavirus circulating in Brazil.

The experience lasts for Eight months and includes the application of the two doses of the vaccine – with an interval of three months – and the monitoring of the state of health of all those who have been vaccinated, as well as that of the inhabitants of the neighboring towns, who will be used as basis of comparison.

Study officials will take genetic sequences of samples from all residents of Botucatu who contract the virus after being immunized to identify variants that continue to cause COVID-19 cases and try to identify genetic or behavioral characteristics. that can influence the prevalence of infections.

The study may help define strategies to follow after vaccination against covid-19 in Brazil, the second country in the world in number of deaths from the disease, with nearly 435,000 victims, and the third in number of infections, with some 15.6 million cases.

Brazil, with 84 million vaccines already distributed throughout the country by laboratories AstraZeneca, Sinovac and Pfizer, has already applied the first dose of immunizers to around 19% of its population and the two doses to almost 10%.

According to epidemiologist Cargos Magno Fortaleza, a Unesp researcher and one of the study coordinators, he is the first time that a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is subjected to such an experiment in the world.

The researcher claimed that Botucatu was chosen precisely because of its size so that the study results could give a “real dimension” of how a vaccine can impact reducing the number of cases, of hospitalizations and deaths due to covid-19, and should serve as a benchmark for other countries.

“All new cases notified and confirmed by the laboratory will be monitored and all viruses responsible for these infections will be sequenced to identify the variants that continue to circulate and the most resistant,” added Fortaleza.

The experiment is similar to the one launched a few weeks ago in Serrana, another city in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, although smaller, but with the difference that the vaccine developed by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac and the adult population has been used in this. municipality. she was vaccinated during a campaign that lasted almost a month.

Source: EFE

DD