Is Brazil vaccinating too little or too slow? Five data from the global rankings

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – As 4,000 deaths per day are currently unavoidable, criticism of Jair Bolsonaro’s government has focused on Brazil’s vaccination performance. After all, does Brazil vaccinate too little or too slow?

If the comparison considers only the total number of doses that each country applied, Brazil appears in fifth place in the global ranking of official data compiled by Oxford University. This is to be expected for the world’s sixth-most populous country, with 212 million inhabitants.

But when the comparison of total doses applied considers the population size of each country, Brazil is ranked 73rd out of 166 nations and territories.

The comparison can also be made with Brazil itself. The Ministry of Health states that the country has an installed capacity to vaccinate 2.4 million people per day. It has already vaccinated 18 million children in the campaign against polio. But since January 17, 2021, Brazil has only passed the mark of 1 million vaccinated for Covid-19 in 24 hours three times.

BBC News Brazil presents below five charts to locate the country in this race against the disease itself, which has led the national health system to collapse and killed more than 340,000 people in Brazil so far.

The Brazilian data, decentralized, usually have slight differences depending on the source: federal government, health secretariats, independent researchers, or a consortium of news media. The comparisons below are based on each country’s most recent data and collected on the Oxford portal.

To date, 387 million people have received at least one dose against Covid-19 worldwide, equivalent to about 5% of the global population.

Percentage of the population administered at least one dose? Brazil ranks 68th

By April 6th, Brazil had administered at least one dose to 8.4% of its population. This puts the country in 68th place in the ranking of 166 nations and territories.

In the Americas, Brazil is in 12th place. The best-positioned country on the continent is Chile, which has applied at least one dose in 37% of the population. Even with the significant advance of vaccination there, the South American country has also faced a collapse in its health system, indicating that the pandemic containment needs to be associated with effective measures of social distancing and universal use of masks to avoid infection.

Percentage of the population administered two doses? Brazil ranks 56th 

Except for Janssen’s vaccine, all immunizers require two doses to achieve maximum effectiveness against coronavirus. In general, a person can be considered fully immunized two weeks after receiving the second dose.

Some countries, such as the UK, have decided to extend the period between doses to ensure that a larger portion of their population is partially immunized sooner.

In the ranking of the population that received two doses, Brazil (2.4%) is 56th in the world and 8th in the Americas.

How fast is the vaccination schedule? Brazil ranks 58th 

In terms of the speed of doses administered daily per 1 million inhabitants, Brazil (3,111) ranks 58th globally and 10th in the Americas.

As indicated above, Brazil has a huge installed capacity behind a national vaccination program recognized worldwide. Still, the lack of vaccines prevents the country from reaching the immunization levels of other decades. In the H1N1 pandemic, for example, Brazil immunized almost 80 million people in three months.

The federal government distributed, from January 17 to April 07 of this year, almost 43.3 million doses to states and municipalities. Still, only 24.2 million of these had been applied, according to data from the Ministry of Health.

The difference between the number of doses distributed and applied in Brazil is explained partly by the need to reserve an amount as a second dose. An eventual shortage could affect the immunity of those vaccinated. To try to speed up vaccination, the federal government recommended using these reserves as the first dose because suppliers had guaranteed deliveries – however, most deliveries have in fact been delayed.

But this change in federal guidance has not yet affected the pace of vaccination. In the face of shortages and delays, most local administrators will likely maintain reserving doses for the second application weeks after the first. The efficacy against Covid-19 is only guaranteed two weeks after the application of the second dose.

A recent study by UFJF (Federal University of Juiz de Fora) pointed out that Brazil needs to vaccinate 2 million per day to control the pandemic within a year. And currently, the country has barely managed to pass 1 million per day.

How many doses have been bought in all? Brazil ranks 6th 

The acceleration of applications in the pandemic runs into a worldwide problem: the lack of vaccines.

In Brazil’s case, this has worsened because the Bolsonaro government refused successive offers from Pfizer, placed all its chips on the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, threatened to boycott Coronavac due to political disputes with the government of São Paulo, and only decided to buy other vaccines when the line of countries waiting to purchase was already “around the corner.”

On paper, the Ministry of Health’s current schedule foresees 563 million doses and the delivery of 154 million of them in the first half of 2021, considering only Anvisa-approved vaccines: Coronavac, AstraZeneca-Oxford, and Pfizer.

This would be enough to immunize the entire priority group. Still, it doesn’t mean that all those 78 million people will be vaccinated before July – Brazil has been able to apply about half of the available doses, and there is a gap of weeks between the first and the second dose of Coronavac and Pfizer, while the delay between AstraZeneca jabs is 3 months.

But the constant delays in imports of components, ingredients, and vaccines, and problems in domestic production, as well as the non-approval of other immunizers by the National Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) make this schedule increasingly difficult to achieve.

A Duke University survey points out that Brazil is the sixth-largest buyer of vaccines globally, with 370 million doses bought (and another 208 million with negotiated purchase option).

It is behind the European Union (1.8 billion), the USA (1.2 billion), the Covax consortium (coordinated by the World Health Organization to benefit poorer countries with 1.1 billion doses), the African Union (670 million), and the United Kingdom (457 million).
How many doses were applied in total? Brazil in 5th place

The total number of doses applied in Brazil is the main argument used to exalt the Brazilian vaccination program’s progress.

In this aspect, Brazil is in 5th place globally, with 22.8 million applications until April 6th. It is behind only the USA (168.5 million), China (145.9 million), India (87 million), and England (31.1 million).

Sources: Época, BBC