Brazil’s Covid CPI: Pfizer confirms that Bolsonaro government ignored vaccine offer for December 2020

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The president of Pfizer for Latin America, Carlos Murillo, confirmed Thursday that the pharmaceutical company offered to deliver the first anti-viral vaccines to Brazil by the end of 2020 and that the government of Jair Bolsonaro ignored this proposal.

Murillo appeared before a Senate committee investigating possible government omissions in the fight against the pandemic and said that contacts with Brazil began in May 2020. According to an offer presented in August, Pfizer could have delivered the first 1.5 million doses to the country last December.

The committee’s instructor, Renan Calheiros, emphasized that by the time these first vaccines could have arrived from Pfizer, the country was registering some 194,000 deaths due to coronavirus, a number that now reaches almost 430,000.

The senator recalled that the first vaccine in Brazil, elaborated by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, was applied on January 17 and inquired about the “difficulties” that Pfizer faced in negotiating with the Government.

Murillo, a Bolivian national, said that the contacts with the Government began in May last year and that, at the beginning of August, with the vaccine still in the development phase, an offer was presented for the delivery of 30 million doses, of which 500,000 would arrive in December.

According to Murillo, the offer was improved at the end of August and increased to 70 million doses, with 1.5 million in December and the remaining doses until mid-2021.

He explained that this offer, due to the high demand that already existed in the world, was valid for 15 days. After this period, Pfizer “did not receive either a negative or positive response” on the matter.

A LETTER TO BOLSONARO AND HIS MINISTERS THAT ALSO RECEIVED NO RESPONSE

Murillo confirmed that the company sent a letter in September to President Bolsonaro and several of his ministers reiterating its interest in supplying vaccines to Brazil, and no response.

She said that, as a result of that letter, Pfizer representatives met in December with the then government press secretary, Fabio Wajngarten, who testified the day before before before the commission and revealed the existence of that communication.

In that meeting, according to Murillo, participated, among others, the Rio de Janeiro councilman Carlos Bolsonaro, son of the president, and the president’s international affairs advisor, Filipe Martins.

Murillo admitted, however, that Pfizer’s offers were conditioned to the approval of the regulatory agencies and to the solution of legal problems that existed in Brazil in relation to the vaccine contract.

He pointed out that the negotiation with Brazil began simultaneously with other countries and cited as an example that the vaccine was approved on December 2 in the United Kingdom, which six days later applied what the first dose in the world was.

In the case of Brazil, the contract with Pfizer was finally signed on March 19, for 100 million doses for this year, days after the Parliament approved the contractual conditions, which had been under discussion since November and which the Government described as “leonine”.

Murillo denied that this was the case and assured that the conditions are the same in all the countries that use the Pfizer vaccine, one of the most effective against the coronavirus, but acknowledged that other governments have rejected, although he did not identify them.

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