Flight with 2 million Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine doses lands in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The aircraft carrying the vaccine departed the Indian city of Mumbai at around 10:30 AM (local time) on Monday, February 22nd. The plane made a stopover in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, then took off to São Paulo at 10:40 PM (local time) – 3:40 PM on Monday (Brasília time).

The vaccines will now proceed to Rio de Janeiro, where they will be taken to the Institute of Technology in Immunobiologicals (Bio-Manguinhos) of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz).

The doses were produced by the Serum Institute, AstraZeneca’s partner in India and the world’s largest vaccine producer. Despite being ready, the vaccines will first need to be labeled by Bio-Manguinhos before they can be released to the National Immunization Program (PNI).

The import of ready doses is a parallel strategy to vaccine production agreed between AstraZeneca and Fiocruz.

To expedite vaccine availability to the population, 2 million doses have already been flown in from India in January, and a total of 10 million ready doses are expected to be imported. In addition to the 2 million that landed in Brazil on Tuesday, another 8 million are expected to be delivered within the next two months.

While negotiating the delivery of ready doses, Fiocruz is working on the local production of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. According to the agreement with the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company, Fiocruz will produce 100.4 million vaccine doses until July, from an imported active pharmaceutical ingredient (API).

The first shipment of the raw material has already reached Bio-Manguinhos and the first million doses produced at Fiocruz are scheduled to be delivered between March 15th and 19th.

According to Fiocruz, the first two batches will be released internally in the next few days. These batches are intended for trials to establish production parameters.

“With these results, the institution will produce the three validation batches, whose documentation will be submitted to the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency. These batches will total some 1 million doses and their results will be sent to the Agency by mid-March.”

The technology transfer process for API production in Brazil is also underway at Fiocruz, which will enable the foundation to be self-sufficient in vaccine production.

The first doses with a domestically produced API are expected to be delivered to the Ministry of Health in August, and another 110 million doses will be delivered by the end of 2021, raising the total produced in the year by Fiocruz to 210.4 million.

Source: Agência Brasil