On January 17, weeks after other countries in Latin America and around the world began their mass inoculation campaigns, Brazil finally administered its first COVID-19 jab in the state of Sao Paulo using the CoronaVac vaccine developed by the Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac. That first jab was one of the 6 million doses imported by the state-funded Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo, which helped develop the vaccine.

A few days later on January 23, the federally funded Fiocruz Institute announced that it received two million ready-to-use doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines from India and started distributing them across the country. Since then, over one million Brazilians have been vaccinated against the deadly virus.

Full article at Al Jazeera’s website. Date of publication: 01/02/2021.