Brazil’s newly launched vaccination campaign against Covid-19 has gotten off to a late and rocky start — as the country is hammered by a second wave of the disease, it is already close to running out of vaccine, syringes and other vital equipment, according to scientists who blame the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
The late rollout, hampered by short supplies, has sparked growing public ire, with widespread complaints about people being vaccinated out of turn. The inoculation drive so far involves six million doses of the CoronaVac vaccine from China’s Sinovac, and two million of the British AstraZeneca-Oxford jab, which arrived Friday after several delays from India where they are made.
Any interruption in the supply chain could bring the vaccination program to a sudden halt, according to Isabella Ballalai, vice president of the Brazilian Society for Immunology . The government acknowledged this month that it lacked 30 million syringes for the first phase of its national plan, which aims — over an unclear timeline — to immunize 50 million people.
Many experts attribute the delays to Bolsonaro’s frequent criticism of the CoronaVac vaccine, which they say has offended the Chinese.
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