The Brazilian Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, announced that a third dose against the coronavirus will be applied from September 15 to those over 70 years of age and immunosuppressed. The measure, Queiroga told the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, was taken for avoid a new wave caused by the Delta variant, which is highly contagious and prevalent in states like Rio de Janeiro.
“The decision was made after a meeting with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO),” Queiroga stressed in this regard. On Tuesday night the Minister of Health had told journalists that the date chosen for the third dose was due to the fact that by that time it is expected that the entire adult population of the country will have received at least one vaccine.
A statement from the Ministry of Health reported that “Immunization should preferably be carried out with a third dose of Pfizer or, alternatively, with a viral vector vaccine from Janssen or AstraZeneca”. The booster is intended for the elderly over 70 who were the first to be vaccinated as of January 17, when Brazil only applied doses of CoronaVac and AstraZeneca. It would later be extended to all people with more than 28 days of their full immunization cycle.
After the confirmation of the Health portfolio, the regulatory National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) asked the state laboratory Fiocruz, responsible for the local production of the AstraZeneca vaccine, “information on booster doses.” “The objective is to anticipate information to evaluate the scenario around the need or not for additional doses of vaccines against covid-19 in use in Brazil”, pointed the Anvisa.
Until now 124.1 million people received a dose in Brazil, 58.65 percent of the population, while 55.9 million people completed their regimen with two doses or a single dose, the equivalent of 26.42 percent. The country has been below the daily average of a thousand deaths for 24 days January, before the second wave that collapsed the hospital system and caused records of deaths between March and June.
Argentina’s main trading partner is the second country with the most deaths from the coronavirus in the world, only after the United States. In total, Brazil accumulates 20,645,537 cases and 576,645 deaths from the pandemic, taking into account that the first confirmed contagion in Latin America was in the city of São Paulo on February 26, 2020.
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