RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Butantan Institute may delay delivery of the CoronaVac vaccine to the Ministry of Health, due to a shortage of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) imported from China. The Institute’s president Dimas Covas blamed president Jair Bolsonaro’s government stance toward the Asian country for this delay.
At a press conference to mark the delivery of a shipment of 1 million doses of the vaccine to the Ministry’s National Immunization Program (PNI), Covas said the delay in the delivery of API is not due to production issues of Sinovac, which supplies Brazil with the raw material for the Butantan to bottle vaccine doses, but rather to the delay in the Chinese government’s authorization for shipment.
On Wednesday, Bolsonaro implied in a statement that the novel coronavirus causing Covid-19 may have been created by China as part of “bacteriological warfare,” in the president’s words. Moreover, Economy Minister Paulo Guedes earlier said in a meeting, which he was unaware was being recorded, that the coronavirus was created in China.
An investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that the most likely origin of the novel coronavirus was a market in Wuhan, China, and that the virus may have passed from a bat to another animal that then passed it on to humans.