BRASILIA/SAO PAULO: Brazilian health regulator Anvisa on Sunday opened an extraordinary meeting of its board of directors to decide whether to approve emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines from China’s Sinovac Biotech and Britain’s AstraZeneca to begin immunizations as the pandemic enters a deadly second wave.
Anvisa’s decision will be a simple majority vote of the board’s five directors. The meeting started just after 10 a.m. local time (1300 GMT) and is expected to last about five hours.
President Jair Bolsonaro, a coronavirus skeptic who has refused to take a vaccine himself, is under growing pressure to start inoculations in Brazil, which has lost more than 200,000 to COVID-19 – the worst death toll outside the United States. (Graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/34pvUyi)
However, delays with vaccine shipments and testing results have held up vaccinations in the country, once a global leader in mass immunizations and now regional laggard after peers such as Chile and Mexico…