US and China should not leave Brazil ‘on its knees’ over vaccine, says Kátia Abreu

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – “We need to tell the world that we have become a great covid producer. We represent a global risk for being a producer of new strains. We need vaccines, and lots of them. It can’t be in dribs and drabs, as it is now,” said on Monday, Senator Kátia Abreu (PP-TO), president of the Senate Foreign Relations Commission.

For weeks, Kátia Abreu has been articulating an offensive in Congress, independent of the Foreign Ministry, in an attempt to access more vaccine doses for the Brazilian population abroad. Her focus is on Brazil’s two largest trade partners: USA and China.

She has promoted a meeting between senators and the Chinese ambassador Yang Wanming, presented Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello the option of negotiating with new Chinese laboratories and her latest move was to organize together with the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, a letter of appeal to US vice-president Kamala Harris for the Americans to sell part of their supply of AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines to Brazil, which are still not authorized for emergency use by the US health regulator, the FDA.

The letter was sent on Friday, March 19th, and so far there has been no reply.

The political offensive occurs amid the upsurge of the pandemic in the country, which has reached a level classified by Fiocruz as “the biggest health and hospital collapse in the history of Brazil.”

Last week, with the death of Major Olímpio, the pandemic claimed its 3rd fatal victim among Kátia Abreu’s 81 colleagues in the Senate.

With Information of BBC Brasil