Jair Bolsonaro against the Chinese vaccine | He stopped testing …

The political dispute between the president Jair Bolsonaro and the governor of San Pablo, Joao doria, hinders the development of the Chinese vaccine against Covid-19. The National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) is suspending clinical trials in the state of São Paulo, despite reports indicating that the death of a volunteer is unrelated to the development of the drug.

The Brazilian health authority received information on Tuesday about the death of a 33-year-old volunteer who excludes the existence of a link between death and the Chinese vaccine. However, the test of the treatment, which Bolsonaro strongly resisted, remains suspended.

The hypothesis handled by the local police is that the death could have been caused by a suspected suicide of the volunteer or overdoseSao Paulo newspaper Folha reported. However, the president of the health agency, Admiral Antonio Barra Torres, assured at a press conference that he did not have access to this information and that awaits official confirmation to resume testing.

According to the director of the Butantan Institute, Divas Covas, responsible for leading the trials and production of the Chinese vaccine, “death is not linked to the vaccine”, therefore “there is no reason to stop the clinical study“, which is in phase 3.

In the same vein, the governor of São Paulo said that it was impossible to link the death to the vaccine. “Anvisa has been told of a death, not of a side effect. These are different issues,” Covas said.

The CoronaVac embodies a political battle in Brazil between one of its greatest defenders of the country, the governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria, and his main rival, President Jair Bolsonaro.

On different occasions, Bolsonaro disqualified the Chinese vaccine and instead promoted the one developed by the University of Oxford with the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Last month the president canceled an agreement to purchase 46 million doses of the Chinese vaccine that had been announced by its own Minister of Health. “The Brazilian people will not be anyone’s guinea pig,” said Bolsonario, who called the project “Joao Doria’s Chinese vaccine”.

A few hours before the announcement of the suspension of rehearsals, Doria had indicated that the first 120,000 doses of CoronaVac weren arrived in Sao Paulo on November 20. His state has reached an agreement with Sinovac to buy 46 million doses, six million produced in China and the rest in Sao Paulo.

“State government officials fear that Bolsonaro is using technical decisions to delay the immunization schedule for political reasons,” Sao Paulo’s Folha newspaper reported, citing Doria’s allies.