RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Monday, July 12, Sinovac announced that it will supply up to 380 million doses of its CoronaVac vaccine to the World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) Covax program.
Distribution will be handled through a purchase agreement signed between the Chinese pharmaceutical company and the Gavi Alliance.
The initial forecast is for 50 million doses to be delivered by the end of September this year. The contract also includes a clause providing for an option to purchase an additional 150 million doses in the fourth quarter 2021 and 180 million doses in the first half of 2022.
In addition to the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, the Covax consortium also included another Chinese immunizer: Sinopharm’s vaccine. According to the alliance’s announcement, 110 million doses of vaccine will be delivered between July and October: 50 million CoronaVac doses by September and another 60 million Sinopharm doses by the following month.
The Covax Facility is a W.H.O. initiative to distribute Covid-19 immunizers to lower-income countries that have not yet secured large batches of vaccine directly from pharmaceutical companies. The consortium purchases these immunizers and ships them to consortium member countries. With the consortium’s inclusion of the two Chinese vaccines, Covax has a total of 11 immunizers available for distribution.
Brazil is one of the members and has so far received doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer’s vaccines through the initiative. The CoronaVac vaccine is distributed in Brazil by the Ministry of Health’s National Immunization Program (PNI), thanks to the agreement signed between the Chinese pharmaceutical company responsible for developing the vaccine, Sinovac, and the Butantan Institute, linked to the São Paulo state government.
Brazil’s accession to the alliance was announced in September 2020, when the country signed a contract worth approximately R$2.5 billion (US$480 million) to join the initiative.
In exchange, Brazil will receive 42.5 million vaccine doses of the immunizers under development against Covid-19, which are enough to immunize approximately 10% of the population.