In Brazil, a mass inoculation campaign against Covid 19 will only be possible from March and will rely on the Astra Zeneca vaccine, a senior health official at the country’s leading public biomedical institute told Reuters.
Brazil’s health regulator Anvisa said on Wednesday it was open to approving COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use and outlined the requirements for companies looking to do so.
Days after grabbing headlines with its COVID-19 “vaccine for the world”, AstraZeneca is facing tricky questions about its success rate that some experts say could hinder its chances of getting speedy U.S. and EU regulatory approval.
The British government said on Friday it has asked its independent medicines regulator to assess AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine as part of the formal approval process for the drug to be rolled out by the end of the year.
Brazil’s national health regulator allowed clinical trials of a Chinese-developed Covid-19 vaccine to resume on Wednesday, two days after suspending them in what critics called a decision tainted by politics.
Chilean President Sebastian Piñera said the country’s health regulators had given the go-ahead to a clinical trial of the AstraZeneca PLC COVID-19 vaccine. Piñera said the AstraZeneca trial would follow one by America’s Johnson & Johnson that is already underway and another by China’s Sinovac, whose first vaccine doses arrived in Chile last week.
Argentina has struck a deal with drug maker AstraZeneca Plc to receive around 22 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine being developed with the University of Oxford, with the aim to start deliveries in the first half of next year.
Argentina President Alberto Fernandez said on Friday his country could receive 750,000 doses of an eventual coronavirus vaccine from U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc in December, a glimmer of hope as cases in the South American nation show signs of receding following months of quarantine.
A volunteer taking part in clinical trials of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University has died in Brazil, officials announced on Wednesday, though media reports said he had received a placebo, not the test vaccine.
The European Union has sealed a deal with Johnson & Johnson to supply up to 400 million doses of its potential COVID-19 vaccine, as the bloc builds up stocks amid a global scramble to secure shots.