The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation should start manufacturing the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 with the active pharmaceutical ingredient (IFA) fully produced in Brazil on May 15.
The action eliminates the need to import the raw material of an immunizer. The forecast was made by the vice president of Fiocruz, Mario Moreira, at a press conference held by the Ministry of Health last week. The foundation is in a position to produce the IFA and has already obtained the certification of good practices by the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa).
“We are going to have to produce validation batches agreed with international procedures, and from there we start to produce on an industrial scale. The expectation is that in October we will have the clearance to deliver these batches produced from May onwards,” said Moreira. The production with the national IFA is the result of a technology transfer agreement between Fiocruz and the consortium formed by the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. So far the doses produced depend on IFA imported from China.
On Monday, the Ministry of Health also started distributing another batch of the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer / BioNTech, with 1.12 million doses, intended for the first application in people with comorbidities, pregnant women, puerperal women and people with permanent disabilities. All states and the Federal District will receive the immunizer in a proportional and equal way.