Nurse Mónica Calazans, 54, receives this Sunday in São Paulo the first coronavirus vaccine administered in Brazil.AMANDA PEROBELLI / Reuters
As if it were the final of a reality TV contest, thousands of Brazilians this Sunday followed the YouTube broadcast of the four hours of deliberations on the coronavirus vaccine from the leadership of the Health Surveillance Agency.
It was the key session of a process that has generated an unprecedented expectation because the cases and deaths continue to increase.
And because the vaccine is the star of a political soap opera that lasts for weeks.
After four hours of meeting, the two candidate injections (Sinovac and Astra Zeneca / Oxford) have been approved unanimously.
A few minutes later, a 54-year-old black nurse fighting the coronavirus in a São Paulo hospital has become the first person to be vaccinated in Brazil.
The nationwide immunization will begin, if nothing goes wrong, next Wednesday.
Bolsonaro, who suffered from the disease, has been very clear.
He doesn't plan to put it on.
It is striking that Brazil, which has a broad and powerful national immunization system, lags behind not only rich countries but countries like Indonesia, Turkey or India, which are already vaccinating.
Everything in this pandemic has been grossly politicized despite the fact that it is the second country in the world with the most deaths and the third with the most infections.
Manaus, where the lack of oxygen in some hospitals has caused deaths, is a reminder of how acute the health crisis is.
Both vaccines have received provisional emergency authorization by five votes in favor and none against.
The decision, adopted in a meeting followed in some moments by more than 20,000 people simultaneously on this Sunday of the Brazilian summer, has been adopted by the management of the regulatory agency in an environment full of suspicions.
Appointed by the Bolsonaro Government, there was a suspicion that the leadership of the body could favor the vaccine sponsored by the president to the detriment of the one promoted by the governor of São Paulo, João Doria.
In the end they have followed the criteria of the technical reports.
What is new is not that, for the sake of transparency, the agency retransmits its meetings over the Internet, which it has been doing for a decade, but the expectation it has raised.
(The deliberations of the Supreme Court can also be followed on YouTube.)
The photo starring the nurse Mónica Calazans - obese, hypertensive and diabetic - was the most precious booty of the dispute in which the president, Jair Bolsonaro, and the governor of São Paulo, João Doria, who dreams of contesting the presidency are involved within two years.
This assault was won by the governor because the first vaccination was done in his state, São Paulo, and with the compound that he imported months ago to the Chinese Sinovac.
Doria had stored six million doses since December awaiting authorization.
To further humiliate Bolsonaro, for now the only vaccine available at the start of the campaign is the Chinese one.
The same one he tried to exclude from the federal immunization program.
The two million doses of the AstraZeneca / Oxford injection that your government bought from a pharmaceutical company in India have not arrived.
Despite the intense Brazilian efforts, the Government of Narendra Modi has vetoed the export because it wants to administer them to its own population, which it began to vaccinate this weekend.
The Brazilian Ministry of Health has announced the start of vaccination for Wednesday in centers throughout all states, but the unknowns proliferate.
First he has to get São Paulo to give him doses of the Chinese vaccine and then organize the logistics of the deployment.
The syringe shortage of a few weeks ago has apparently been resolved.
The decision-making body of the health surveillance agency raised suspicions due to the proximity of several of them to the president and his theses on the disease.
They are a Navy Rear Admiral, a friend of Bolsonaro who participated with him and without a mask in several protests, a doctor who on social networks has defended chloroquine for covid, although its effectiveness has not been proven, a former collaborator of the Minister of Health to whom Bolsonaro cut off his head and two veteran officials of the regulatory agency.
The plan is that later the Butantan Institute of São Paulo will manufacture the Sinovac injection at its facilities and that the Fiocruz Institute of Rio de Janeiro will manufacture the AstraZeneca / Oxford one.
Brazil has been the scene of several clinical trials and would like to become the largest manufacturer and exporter of coronavirus vaccines in the region.
For now it is late.
