Deaths surge amid vaccine fiasco
Outrage grows as Brazil’s Astrazeneca gamble hits delays
April is shaping up to be Brazil’s darkest month yet in the pandemic as hospitals struggle with a crush of patients, deaths are on track for record highs and there are few signs of a reprieve from a troubled vaccination programme.
The Health Ministry has cut its outlook for vaccine supplies in April three times already, to half their initial level, and the country’s two biggest laboratories are facing supply constraints.
The delays also mean tens of thousands more deaths as the particularly contagious P.1 variant of Covid-19 sweeps Brazil. Latin America’s largest nation has recorded about 350,000 of the 2.9 million virus deaths worldwide, behind only the US toll of more than 560,000.
Brazil’s seven-day rolling average has increased to 2820 deaths per day according to data to April 8 from Johns Hopkins University.
The death toll is forecast to continue rising in the next two weeks to an average of nearly 3500 per day before receding, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Public health experts blame President Jair Bolsonaro for refusing to enact strict measures to halt infections and for clashing with governors and mayors who did.
Failure to control the spread has been compounded by the Health Ministry betting big on a single vaccine, Astrazeneca, then buying only one backup, the Chinesemanufactured Coronavac, after supply problems emerged. Authorities ignored other producers and squandered opportunities until it was too late to get large quantities of vaccine for the first half of 2021.
With extensive experience in successful, massive vaccination programmes, Brazil should have known better, said Claudio Maierovitch, former head of Brazil’s health regulator.
“The big problem is that Brazil did not look for alternatives when it had the chance,” he said. “When several countries were placing their bets, signing contracts with different suppliers, the Brazilian Government didn’t even have vaccination on its agenda.”
For months, Bolsonaro’s Administration ignored pleas to sign more than one contract for vaccines. The
President publicly questioned the reliability of other vaccines and scoffed at contractual terms, suggesting that recipients of the Pfizer/biontech vaccine would have no legal recourse were they to transform into alligators. He insisted he wouldn’t force anyone to get vaccinated and only recently said he might get vaccinated himself.
Denise Garrett, vice-president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute that advocates for expanding global vaccine access, said she despaired at the government strategy. Brazil has been far and away Latin America’s immunisation front-runner, so much so that she hadn’t seen it in the same league as the region’s other countries.
Given the problems in vaccine development and distribution, “it’s definitely not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket”, she said.
Stalled supplies of the Astrazeneca vaccine in January amid pressure for Brazil to begin its vaccination campaign prompted the Health Ministry to acquire tens of millions of vaccines from Sao Paulo state’s Butantan Institute, which is mixing an active ingredient from China with a sterile solution and bottling it. The vaccines were a result of negotiations with Chinese company Sinovac and went ahead despite Bolsonaro’s criticisms.
Brazil’s Government also dragged its feet in signing on to the World Health Organisation’s Covax initiative providing vaccines to poorer nations.
It ultimately bought the bare minimum — enough for 10 per cent of its population of 210 million.
In February, Brazil began signing contracts with other pharmaceutical companies, but none of their vaccines have been administered. Of the 10 per cent of people who received one dose so far, the vast majority received Butantan’s shot and the rest got the Astrazeneca shot, which government health institute Fiocruz is bottling.
Both Brazilian labs face supply problems. Butantan said last week it was suspending production while it awaits shipments of the active ingredient from China. Fiocruz has produced only four million of the 50 million doses it agreed to deliver by the end of April.
That threatens to reduce the speed of vaccinations, which finally hit one million doses per day last week.
Intensive care units for Covid-19 patients in most Brazilian states are above 90 per cent capacity. Seven of every 10 hospitals in the country risk running out of supplemental oxygen and anesthetic in the next few days, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported last week.
The surge of deaths has brought widespread outcry. Brazil’s Association of Collective Health, which has nearly 20,000 members including doctors, nurses and health experts, published an open letter this week demanding a three-week national lockdown, echoing increasingly urgent calls from others.
Bolsonaro has refused proposed lockdowns, claiming their economic impact would be more devastating than the virus. He even took three states to the Supreme Court last month for adopting such restrictions.
“If we just wait for the vaccine to reach all risk groups, many people will die,” said the health association’s president, Gulnar Azevedo e Silva. “There is no national co-ordination. And if we don’t have that, what happens? Chaos.” —AP