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Brazil allows trials of Chinese CoronaVac vaccine to resume
- Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has criticised the vaccine ‘from that other country’, had claimed the suspension of trials as a victory
- However, public health officials said a volunteer recipient’s death, which police are investigating as a suicide, had no connection with the vaccine.
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Agence France-Pressein Sao Paulo
Brazil’s national health regulator allowed clinical trials of a Chinese-developed Covid-19 vaccine to resume on Wednesday, two days after suspending them in what critics called a decision tainted by politics.
The regulatory agency, Anvisa, said it had now received more details on the nature of the “adverse incident” that led it to halt trials of Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac vaccine, and had “sufficient information to allow vaccination to resume.”
Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has criticised the vaccine “from that other country,” had claimed the suspension as a victory. The president, known as “Trump of the Tropics” for his populist platform, has said Brazilians were being used as guinea pigs for CoronaVac and questioned its safety.
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However, public health officials said the “adverse incident” that led to the suspension – a volunteer recipient’s death, which police are investigating as a suicide – had no connection with the vaccine.
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Marcos Caramuru de Paiva, Brazil’s ambassador to China from 2016 to 2018, earlier said the US presidential election would be a factor in how the vaccine conflict played out.
Bolsonaro and his inner circle were heavily influenced by US President Donald Trump’s tough-on-China policy, but now he was on his way out of the White House, the Brazilian president had less motivation to pursue such a policy with a trading partner as important as China, he said.
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