Coronavirus: China sceptic Jair Bolsonaro thanks Beijing for fast-tracking Brazil vaccine supplies
- The Chinese shipments mean Brazil will have ingredients to make 8.5 million doses of Sinovac’s shot, as well as some of AstraZeneca’s
- Bolsonaro, who previously ridiculed the Sinovac product, has been come under fire for the country’s slow vaccine roll-out
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, a long-time China sceptic, thanked Beijing on Monday for rapidly approving export of enough active ingredients to produce about 8.5 million doses of Sinovac Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine being made in Sao Paulo, as his government scrambles to secure scarce shots.
Bolsonaro tweeted that China has also fast-tracked approval for supplies of active ingredients to make AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine in Brazil.
Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who says he will not take any Covid-19 shot, has been criticised for the slow and patchy nature of Brazil’s vaccine roll-out.
The setbacks to the national immunisation plan are the latest example of his poor handling of the pandemic, critics say. Latin America’s largest nation has over 217,000 Covid-19 deaths, second in the world after the United States.
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With few vaccines to inoculate Brazil’s 210 million people and a rampant second wave, the country now finds itself almost entirely reliant on the Sinovac vaccine that Bolsonaro, a China hawk, had previously ridiculed.