RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Austria joins the group of countries restricting the entry of Brazilians and people who have passed through the country to contain variants of the novel coronavirus.
Europe remains closed to people coming from Brazil, while concerns about insufficient anti-Covid vaccines are growing in several countries.
Austria has announced that as of today passenger flights from Brazil will be banned from landing to prevent the “spread of the dangerous mutation” of the virus. The Brazilian strain of the coronavirus would be more dangerous and was initially detected in Manaus.
The Austrian measure will run until February 7th. The Austrians have adopted a similar ban for the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Yesterday, the United States also banned the entry of passengers from South Africa. There are now approximately 30 countries banned by Washington, including Brazil and the United Kingdom.
France too may soon decide to suspend flights with countries out of the European Union considered to be high-risk, such as Brazil, according to the Paris newspaper “Journal du Dimanche”.
Europeans are “more and more concerned about the different variants” of the coronavirus, declared the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. She suggested that “non-essential travel” is discouraged, to prevent the spread of variants that have emerged.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) says that the so-called P.1 variant has so far been identified only in Brazil and in travelers from Brazil (mainly from Amazonas) reported in Japan and South Korea.
According to the French newspaper “Le Monde”, scientific studies show that the mortality of the British variant could be 30% to 40% higher than the original.
Italy has banned flights originating from Brazil. On Saturday, the Netherlands suspended flights from South America, the United Kingdom and South Africa.
The United Kingdom, now out of the EU and also fighting its own seemingly deadlier strain, has banned travelers from Brazil, Portugal and several other countries. A third confinement in France, with a surge in infections, is a matter of days.
Meanwhile, vaccine production is failing to meet the pandemic emergency in Europe. First, Pfizer/BioNTech announced it would slow down production to expand a plant in Belgium, delaying immunization plans in several countries. On Friday, it was AstraZeneca/Oxford’s turn, reporting “low output” in one of its plants.
This clashes with the European plan, whereby the European Medicines Agency could authorize this vaccine on January 29th, and from then on it would begin to be used for immunization.
According to analysts, one of the problems is that producers are also struggling with a lack of raw materials. To manufacture vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna need enzymes, nucleotides and lipid nanoparticles, which until recently were not produced in a large scale.
Doctors Without Borders lamented that Pfizer/BioNTech’s agreement to supply 40 million doses of the anticovid-19 vaccine for the Covax is too modest to serve poor countries. The agreement represents only 2% of the two billion doses needed for the Covax, the multilateral initiative that will serve dozens of countries unable to afford the vaccine.