São Paulo begins vaccination with Pfizer’s first batch on Thursday, May 6

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – As of Thursday, May 6, the city of São Paulo will resume its vaccination campaign against the novel coronavirus, using the first 135,700 doses of American pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s vaccine.

In this stage, people aged between 60 and 62 will be immunized. The first vaccine batch arrived in the city yesterday, May 4.

According to the acting mayor of São Paulo, Ricardo Nunes, the vaccine will be equally distributed throughout the city in 468 basic health units.

Storage

The Municipal Health Secretariat was required to change the setting of one of the cold rooms to accommodate the vaccine that needs to be stored at lower temperatures. The vials are stored at -25ºC and thawed to positive temperatures between 2ºC and 8ºC to be used within up to 5 days.

With the changes to the equipment, the city of São Paulo can store up to 4 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine for 14 days. The city should receive another batch of the vaccine on May 17.

On Monday, May 3, the Ministry of Health began distributing the first batch of 1 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to the 27 federated states. The distribution logistics took into account the local capacity to store the vaccine doses that need to be kept at lower temperatures than other vaccines.

According to the last balance, 3.38 million doses of vaccines against Covid-19 have been administered in the city of São Paulo, and 1.27 million people received both doses.