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BRASILIA (Reuters) – The biomedical center at the Butantan Institute in Brazil will receive the first doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine against COVID-19 this week, institute director Dimas Covas said on Tuesday.
Covas told a congressional committee tasked with monitoring Brazil’s response to COVID-19 that preliminary results from trials conducted by Butantan in Brazil indicate that the vaccine, called CoronaVac, has an excellent safety profile.
He said Butantan expects to have 46 million doses ready in January pending approval of the vaccine by Brazilian health regulator Anvisa.
Covas said 10,000 volunteers have already received around 19,000 injections of the two-dose vaccine and that 2,000 more have yet to be included in the trials, being conducted at 16 centers linked to Brazilian universities.
Anvisa suspended trials for a day and a half last week after the death of a volunteer, which police reported as suicide, and Butantan said it had nothing to do with the vaccine.
The temporary shutdown had no effect on clinical trials, Covas said, adding that Butantan had a “very good understanding” with Anvisa chief Antonio Barra Torres, who also testified before the committee.
Butantan and Anvisa have sent experts to China where they are in a two-week quarantine before they can visit vaccination facilities, they said.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Maria Carolina Marcello; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Sonya Hepinstall)
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