Brasilia: Brazil must reach the mark of five thousand daily deaths from Covid-19 in the coming days, according to Dr. Dimas Covas, director of the Butantan Institute, the largest national manufacturer of vaccines against the disease, Prensa Latina publishes.
?The next 15 days will be very dramatic. We have exceeded two thousand (deaths per day), we have already passed the three thousand barrier, we are going towards four thousand and we will reach five thousand dead?, predicted Covas in an extensive interview that this Monday the newspaper Valor Economico publishes in full.
According to the doctor, April will be a tragic month for the South American giant and he described it as useless for the Ministry of Health to “talk about what it needs, it needs, it needs vaccines.”
The ministry is having a hard time getting the antidotes and not just those from Butantan, but from everyone, he added.
He explained that ?everyone has already made a commitment; everyone has their commitments and is taking care to fulfill them. Advancing on this is very difficult because global demand is very large. ‘
Covas estimated that it is unrealistic to expect a rapid acceleration in the number of people vaccinated in the coming months, since according to his calculations, until July what the country could do is immunize the population most vulnerable to the disease.
“With our feet on the ground, in the middle of the year there will probably be a vaccination of those over 60 years old and perhaps we can advance a little more in the 50s, also including other professionals at risk”, commented.
He stressed that ‘that’s what we will have in the middle of the year. We are talking about 40 or 50 million people. And 100 million doses of vaccines. ‘
The ministry has two contracts with Butantan: one for the acquisition of 46 million doses of CoronaVac (expected to end this month) and another for 54 million, scheduled for August.
CoronaVac, developed in collaboration with the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, is produced at the institute’s plant in Sao Paulo, but depends on inputs manufactured by the biopharmaceutical in the Asian nation.
Another of the doctor’s concerns is that this difficulty in expediting the availability of antigens against Covid-19 occurs at a tragic moment for Brazil due to the rapid spread of a new variant and the advance of loss of life, which exceeded the mark of 330 thousand.
In addition to vaccines, a comprehensive and coordinated policy at the national level is urgently needed to keep people at home, he stressed.
To date, Brazil accumulates 331 thousand 433 deaths and 12 million 984 thousand 956 infected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes Covid-19.