Butantan has bottled all available CoronaVac raw material, expects new shipment by May 18th

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Butantan Institute has bottled all its available active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) for the CoronaVac, a vaccine against Covid-19 from Chinese Sinovac laboratory, and is now waiting for the arrival of a new lot, expected to be delivered by May 18th, said Butantan’s president Dimas Covas.

“The available API was processed in the first phase, which is bottling. It is in quality control until release,” said Dimas Covas in a press conference at the Bandeirantes Palace, seat of government of the State of São Paulo, to which Butantan is linked.

“The vaccines are still being processed and will be released by May 14th,” he added.

According to Covas, next week Butantan should deliver 3 million doses of the CoronaVac to the Ministry of Health’s National Immunization Program (PNI) and another 1 million doses the following week, thereby completing the full processing of the 3,000 liters of API, equivalent to 5 million doses, that it received from China on April 19th.

“Regarding the new departure of raw material from China, we have a confirmed forecast of 4,000 liters, but we do not have a definite date yet. It should arrive, at most, we hope, by the 18th of this month. This is the situation at the moment”, he stated.

On Thursday, Covas alerted that the Butantan could be short of vaccine doses to deliver to the Ministry of Health due to the delay in the arrival of API imported from China, which he attributed to the Chinese government’s slowness in authorizing the shipment, which in turn, he said, was because of president Jair Bolsonaro’s government stance towards the Asian country.

This week Bolsonaro insinuated that the coronavirus may have been created in China as part of “bacteriological warfare” promoted by the Asian country, and likewise Economy Minister Paulo Guedes recently said that the coronavirus was created in China.

So far, Butantan has delivered 43 million doses of CoronaVac to the Ministry of Health. The Institute’s contract with the Ministry of Health foresees 100 million doses of the vaccine by the end of September.

According to Ministry of Health data, 74.3% of the vaccine doses against Covid-19 administered so far in the national vaccination campaign against the disease were CoronaVac.