Today (16) the Governors Forum met with representatives of the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, and representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) to request assistance in enabling more doses of vaccines. State officials have defended Brazil’s special treatment as “humanitarian aid” in the face of recognition by international agencies that the country is the new epicenter of the epidemic.
The governors called for the support of international institutions to unleash the diversion of the doses stipulated in the mechanism agreement Kovacs facilityA consortium coordinated by the World Health Organization. According to the forum’s coordinator, Piauí’s governor, Wellington Dias, Brazil is entitled to 9.1 million doses from the mechanism, but it has received only a million doses so far.
“There will be an effort so that the 4 million doses that were scheduled for delivery in May can be delivered through the end of April. We will deal with Korea, India and China, which are participating in these production efforts. [dos imunizantes]. In a press conference after the meeting, Dias announced that the handover has been completed until May, and the May-June period is expected to be settled.
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Another request was to participate in negotiations with India to send 15 million active pharmaceutical ingredients (IFAs) – the main raw materials for manufacturing a vaccine – to produce new doses of the CoronaVac vaccine, developed from a partnership between the Butantan Institute and the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac.
15 million IFAs have been promised and will be provided by a serum laboratory in India. However, as cases explode in that country, the input and production of the immune systems are being diverted to serve the local market.
The Conservatives’ request is that at least 10 million IFAs or ready-made doses of Coronavac be delivered by China by the end of April. This is because they warn of the risk of deficiency in this amount leaving people unprotected without applying a second dose even in April.
Technology transfer
In both the CoronaVac case and in the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine case, the Forum defended the work of the United Nations and the World Health Organization in dialogue with pharmaceutical companies to anticipate technology transfer to Brazilian laboratories: Instituto Butantan and Vucruz, respectively.
Such a forecast would allow the two enterprises to start producing entirely new doses in Brazil, without relying on sending inputs from other countries, which would speed up service to the domestic market.
The rulers asked representatives of the two international organizations to help mediate with the government and the US Congress to change the ban on exporting surplus vaccines produced in the country.
The US government expects to fully immunize its population by May. Expectations are that the doses will be left out. The Conservatives want to allow part of this surplus to be sold or loaned to Brazil as an exceptional case of “humanitarian aid.”
Entries and patents
The governors also addressed the collapse in the national health system and the shortage of supplies, especially the drugs that are part of the so-called “intubation kit”, used to support ventilators for Covid-19 patients. And they asked the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations to help in dialogue with countries that have stockpiles of these drugs that they can provide.
Another suggestion was made, as in the case of medicines used to treat people with HIV / AIDS, there is a patent interruption so other laboratories can also produce vaccines.
