By Maria Carolina Marcello and Lisandra Paraguassu
BRASÍLIA (Reuters) – Brazilians should prepare for annual COVID-19 immunizations to reinforce vaccines currently available, the head of public-sector laboratory Butantan said on Thursday.
Annual boosters would add to the burden for Brazil’s shaky national vaccination program, which has struggled to speed up immunizations to confront the world’s most deadly coronavirus outbreak outside the United States.
Just a quarter of adults in Brazil have received their first shot against COVID-19 — and only one in eight have had a second.
Dimas Covas, director of the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo, which has partnered on production of a coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech, told lawmakers the center is already looking into booster shots.
“Everything indicates that there will be a need for annual reinforcement doses against COVID-19,” he told a Senate committee on Thursday. “The vaccines we have today would require annual vaccination… Butantan is already working on that.”
His comments run counter to more than a dozen infectious disease and vaccine development experts who told Reuters earlier this month that yearly boosters may not be needed. The Sinovac shot, branded CoronaVac and produced by Butantan with active ingredients from China, has shown lower efficacy data than vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna .
CoronaVac accounted for roughly five in six coronavirus shots administered in Brazil through April.
The AstraZeneca vaccine, finished at federally funded lab Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro with imported ingredients, accounted for the rest. The first doses of imported Pfizer vaccines began to arrive a month ago.
Pressed by senators investigating Brazil’s slow progress in acquiring vaccines last year, Covas said Butantan first offered to sell the Health Ministry its production of CoronaVac in July, but got no immediate response from the federal government.
Once talks were underway, Covas said the negotiations were derailed by President Jair Bolsonaro’s public comments ruling out a federal purchase of the Chinese vaccine.
The governor of Sao Paulo state, which runs Butantan, is a vocal critic of Bolsonaro and repeatedly confronted the president over his skepticism about CoronaVac.
Covas said Butantan had also reached out to the government about federal financing, which it did not receive, to expand its production capacity and run vaccine trials.
Butantan and Fiocruz have repeatedly missed vaccine delivery targets this year, due in part to delayed shipments of active ingredients from China. Covas said uncertainty about imports could undermine its goal of delivering 100 million CoronaVac doses by the end of September.
In addition to that production line, the institute is developing its own low-cost COVID-19 vaccine, called Butanvac, with an initial target of producing at least 40 million doses in the fourth quarter of this year.
(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu and Maria Carolina Marcello; Writing by Ana Mano; Editing by Brad Haynes, Christian Plumb and Dan Grebler)
