Brazil on Tuesday set yet another grim record of highest <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">coronavirus </a>deaths in a single day with 1,972 new fatalities, according to the Health Ministry.&nbsp;

As many as 70,764 new cases of Covid-19 have been detected in the country in the last 24 hours and 168,370 people have died due to the deadly virus.&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/brazil-posts-new-record-of-1972-covid-related-deaths-in-a-single-day-369305/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

&nbsp;The previous record daily death toll was set on March 3 with just over 1,900 deaths. The severity of the crisis in Brazil can be understood from the fact that in recent days, the country is regularly crossing the record death toll.&nbsp;

"The fight against Covid-19 was lost in 2020 and there is not the slightest chance of reversing this tragic circumstance in the first half of 2021," epidemiologist Jesem Orellana of Fiocruz/Amazonia told news agency AFP.

"The best we can do is hope for the miracle of mass vaccination or a radical change in the management of the pandemic."

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/uk-finds-missing-case-of-brazil-variant-claims-no-sign-it-has-spread-368354">UK finds missing case of Brazil variant, claims no sign it has spread</a>

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been severely criticised for his response to the pandemic, which includes downplaying the threat of Covid-19 and flouting social distancing and mask-wearing rules to contain the spread of the deadly virus.&nbsp;

The vaccination program is also being conducted in the country at a slow pace any so far only 8.6 million people or 4.1 per cent of the population have received the first dose of the vaccine.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;

Brazil on Tuesday set yet another grim record of highest coronavirus deaths in a single day with 1,972 new fatalities, according to the Health Ministry. As many as 70,764 new cases of Covid-19 have been detected in the country in the last 24 hours and 168,370 people have died due to the deadly virus.

Brazil on Tuesday set yet another grim record of highest coronavirus deaths in a single day with 1,972 new fatalities, according to the Health Ministry. As many as 70,764 new cases of Covid-19 have been detected in the country in the last 24 hours and 168,370 people have died due to the deadly virus. Watch | The previous record daily death toll was set on March 3 with just over 1,900 deaths. The severity of the crisis in Brazil can be understood from the fact that in recent days, the country is regularly crossing the record death toll. "The fight against Covid-19 was lost in 2020 and there is not the slightest chance of reversing this tragic circumstance in the first half of 2021," epidemiologist Jesem Orellana of Fiocruz/Amazonia told news agency AFP. "The best we can do is hope for the miracle of mass vaccination or a radical change in the management of the pandemic." Also read | UK finds missing case of Brazil variant, claims no sign it has spread Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been severely criticised for his response to the pandemic, which includes downplaying the threat of Covid-19 and flouting social distancing and mask-wearing rules to contain the spread of the deadly virus. The vaccination program is also being conducted in the country at a slow pace any so far only 8.6 million people or 4.1 per cent of the population have received the first dose of the vaccine.

With 1,972 new fatalities, Brazil yet again sees record Covid-19 deaths

Brazil's ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been cleared of corruption by a Supreme Court judge, opening the path to a possible run for the presidency in 2022.

Supreme Court judges clears Lula of corruption charges

Brazil's Ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been cleared of corruption charges by a Supreme Court judge. This has now cleared a path of a possible run in next year's presidential election.

Brazil: Supreme Court judges clears Lula of corruption charges

Preliminary data from a study conducted at the University of Oxford indicates that the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC is effective against the P1

AstraZeneca vaccine effective against Brazil variant: Study

With 1,910 new deaths due to <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">novel coronavirus</a>, Brazil on Wednesday for the second consecutive day registered a record death toll.&nbsp;

Brazil has witnessed 259,271 deaths, according to the health ministry, the second-highest worldwide, after the United States.

"For the first time since the pandemic began, we are seeing a deterioration across the entire country," public health institute Fiocruz said before the latest figures were announced.

"The situation is alarming."

Watch |&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/second-covid-wave-leaves-brazils-healthcare-in-shambles-367647/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

On Tuesday, Brazil set a new record of 1,641 deaths in the last 24 hours.&nbsp;

This week the average of 1,331 deaths per day has been the deadliest of the country since the pandemic began in 2019.&nbsp;

President Jair Bolsonaro has been criticised for downplaying the pandemic, not taking strong measures and expressing scepticism on the Covid-19 vaccines.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/brazils-covid-crisis-is-a-warning-to-the-whole-world-scientists-say-367778">Brazil’s Covid crisis is a warning to the whole world, scientists say</a>

Holidays and carnival seasons also led to large gatherings and parties which are responsible for the latest surge in the country.

Brazil is also struggling to contain the new variant found in the Amazon city of Manaus which has caused a recent spike in the number of infections.&nbsp;

The intensive care units in 19 Brazilian states are 80 per cent full, Fiocruz said, bringing the health system on the brink of a collapse.&nbsp;

To control the massive spread, several Brazilian states and cities are reimposing curfews and restrictions, despite Bolsonaro threatening to cut off funding.&nbsp;

 
&nbsp;

With 1,910 new deaths due to novel coronavirus, Brazil on Wednesday for the second consecutive day registered a record death toll. Brazil has witnessed 259,271 deaths, according to the health ministry, the second-highest worldwide, after the United States.

With 1,910 new deaths due to novel coronavirus, Brazil on Wednesday for the second consecutive day registered a record death toll. Brazil has witnessed 259,271 deaths, according to the health ministry, the second-highest worldwide, after the United States. "For the first time since the pandemic began, we are seeing a deterioration across the entire country," public health institute Fiocruz said before the latest figures were announced. "The situation is alarming." Watch | On Tuesday, Brazil set a new record of 1,641 deaths in the last 24 hours. This week the average of 1,331 deaths per day has been the deadliest of the country since the pandemic began in 2019. President Jair Bolsonaro has been criticised for downplaying the pandemic, not taking strong measures and expressing scepticism on the Covid-19 vaccines. Also read | Brazil’s Covid crisis is a warning to the whole world, scientists say Holidays and carnival seasons also led to large gatherings and parties which are responsible for the latest surge in the country. Brazil is also struggling to contain the new variant found in the Amazon city of Manaus which has caused a recent spike in the number of infections. The intensive care units in 19 Brazilian states are 80 per cent full, Fiocruz said, bringing the health system on the brink of a collapse. To control the massive spread, several Brazilian states and cities are reimposing curfews and restrictions, despite Bolsonaro threatening to cut off funding.

'Alarming' situation in Brazil as record Covid-19 death toll seen for second straight day

RIO DE JANEIRO — COVID-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record.

No other nation that experienced such a major outbreak is still grappling with record-setting death tolls and a health care system on the brink of collapse. Many other hard-hit nations are, instead, taking tentative steps toward a semblance of normalcy.

But Brazil is battling a more contagious variant that has trampled one major city and is spreading to others, even as Brazilians toss away precautionary measures that could keep them safe.

On Tuesday, Brazil recorded more than 1,700 COVID-19 deaths, the highest single-day toll of the pandemic.

“The acceleration of the epidemic in various states is leading to the collapse of their public and private hospital systems, which may soon become the case in every region of Brazil,” the national association of health secretaries said in a statement. “Sadly, the anemic rollout of vaccines and the slow pace at which they’re becoming available still does not suggest that this scenario will be reversed in the short term.”

And the news just got worse for Brazil — and possibly the world.

Preliminary studies suggest that the variant that swept through the city of Manaus is not only more contagious, but it also appears able to infect some people who have already recovered from other versions of the virus. And the variant has slipped Brazil’s borders, showing up in two dozen other countries and in small numbers in the United States.

Although trials of a number of vaccines indicate they can protect against severe illness even when they do not prevent infection with the variant, most of the world has not been inoculated. That means even people who had recovered and thought they were safe for now might still be at risk and that world leaders might, once again, be lifting restrictions too soon.

“You need vaccines to get in the way of these things,” said William Hanage, a public health researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, speaking of variants that might cause reinfections. “The immunity you get with your cemeteries running out of room, even that will not be enough to protect you.”

That danger of new variants has not been lost on scientists around the world. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pleaded with Americans this week not to let their guards down. “Please hear me clearly,” she said. “At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we’ve gained.”

Brazilians hoped they had seen the worst of the outbreak last year. Manaus, capital of the northern state of Amazonas, was hit so hard in April and May that scientists wondered if the city might have reached herd immunity.

But then in September, cases in the state began rising again, perplexing health officials. An attempt by Amazonas Gov. Wilson Lima to impose a new quarantine ahead of the Christmas holiday was met with fierce resistance by business owners and prominent politicians close to President Jair Bolsonaro.

By January, scientists had discovered that a new variant, which became known as P.1, had become dominant in the state. Within weeks, its danger became clear as hospitals in the city ran out of oxygen amid a crush of patients, leading scores to suffocate to death.

Dr. Antonio Souza remains haunted by the horrified faces of his colleagues and relatives of patients when it became clear his Manaus hospital’s oxygen supply had been exhausted. He thinks about the patient he sedated, to spare her an agonizing death, when the oxygen ran out at another clinic.

“Nobody should ever have to make that decision,” he said. “It’s too terrible.”

Maria Glaudimar, a nurse in Manaus, said she felt trapped in a nightmare early this year with no end in sight. At work, patients and their relatives pleaded for oxygen, and all the intensive care beds were full. At home, her son caught tuberculosis after contracting COVID-19, and her husband shed 22 pounds as he fought the virus.

“No one was prepared for this,” Glaudimar said. “It was a horror film.”

Since then, the coronavirus crisis has eased somewhat in Amazonas but worsened in most of Brazil.

Scientists have scrambled to learn more about the variant and to track its spread across the country. But limited resources for testing have kept them behind the curve as they try to determine what role it is playing.

Anderson Brito, a Brazilian virus expert at Yale University, said his lab alone sequenced almost half as many coronavirus genomes as all of Brazil had. While the United States has done genetic sequencing on roughly one in 200 confirmed cases, Brazil sequences about one in 3,000.

The variant spread quickly. By the end of January, a study by government researchers found it was present in 91% of samples sequenced in the state of Amazonas. By the end of February, health officials had reported cases of the P.1 variant in 21 of 26 Brazilian states, but without more testing it is hard to gauge its prevalence.

Throughout the pandemic, researchers have said that COVID-19 reinfections appear to be extremely rare, which has allowed people who recover to presume they have immunity, at least for a while. But that was before P.1 appeared and doctors and nurses began to notice something strange.

João Alho, a doctor in Santarém, a city in Pará, a state that borders Amazonas, said that several colleagues who recovered from COVID-19 months ago had fallen ill again and tested positive.

Juliana Cunha, a nurse in Rio de Janeiro who has been working at COVID-19 testing centers, said she assumed she was safe after catching the virus in June. But in November, after experiencing mild symptoms, she tested positive again.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Cunha, 23, said. “It must be the variants.”

But there is no way to be sure what is happening to people who are reinfected, unless both their old and new samples are kept, genetically sequenced and compared.

One way to tamp down the surge would be through vaccinations, but the rollout in Brazil, as in so many countries, has been slow.

Brazil began vaccinating priority groups, including health care professionals and the elderly, in late January. But the government has failed to secure a large enough number of doses. Wealthier countries have snapped up most of the available supply, while Bolsonaro has been skeptical both of the disease’s impact and of vaccines.

Just over 5.8 million Brazilians — roughly 2.6% of the population — had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Tuesday, according to the health ministry. Only about 1.5 million had received both doses. The country is currently using the Chinese-made CoronaVac — which laboratory tests suggest is less effective against P.1 than against other variants — and the one made by British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Margareth Dalcolmo, a pulmonologist at Fiocruz, a prominent scientific research center, said Brazil’s failure to mount a robust vaccination campaign set the stage for the current crisis.

“We should be vaccinating more than a million people per day,” she said. “That is the truth. We aren’t, not because we don’t know how to do it, but because we don’t have enough vaccines.”

Other countries should take heed, said Ester Sabino, an infectious disease researcher at the University of São Paulo who is among the leading experts on the P.1 variant.

“You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new variant appears,” she said. “It will get there one day.”

Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello, who called the variant a “new stage” of the pandemic, said last week that the government was ramping up its efforts and hopes to vaccinate roughly half of its population by June and the rest by the end of the year.

But many Brazilians have little faith in a government led by a president who has sabotaged lockdowns, repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus and promoted untested remedies long after scientists said they clearly did not work.

Just last week, the president spoke dismissively of masks, which are among the best defenses to curb contagion, claiming that they are harmful to children, causing headaches and difficulty concentrating.

Pazuello’s vaccine projections have also been met with skepticism. The government last week placed an order for 20 million doses of an Indian vaccine that has not completed clinical trials. That prompted a federal prosecutor to argue in a legal filing that the $286 million purchase “puts millions of lives at risk.”

Even if it proves effective, it will be too late for many.

Tony Maquiné, a 39-year-old marketing specialist in Manaus, lost a grandmother, an uncle, two aunts and a cousin in the span of a few weeks during the latest surge of cases. He said time has become a blur of frantic efforts to find hospitals with free beds for the living, while arranging funerals for the dead.

“It was a nightmare,” Maquiné said. “I’m scared of what lies ahead.”

RIO DE JANEIRO — COVID-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record.

RIO DE JANEIRO — COVID-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record. No other nation that experienced such a major outbreak is still grappling with record-setting death tolls and a health care system on the brink of collapse. Many other hard-hit nations are, instead, taking tentative steps toward a semblance of normalcy. But Brazil is battling a more contagious variant that has trampled one major city and is spreading to others, even as Brazilians toss away precautionary measures that could keep them safe. On Tuesday, Brazil recorded more than 1,700 COVID-19 deaths, the highest single-day toll of the pandemic. “The acceleration of the epidemic in various states is leading to the collapse of their public and private hospital systems, which may soon become the case in every region of Brazil,” the national association of health secretaries said in a statement. “Sadly, the anemic rollout of vaccines and the slow pace at which they’re becoming available still does not suggest that this scenario will be reversed in the short term.” And the news just got worse for Brazil — and possibly the world. Preliminary studies suggest that the variant that swept through the city of Manaus is not only more contagious, but it also appears able to infect some people who have already recovered from other versions of the virus. And the variant has slipped Brazil’s borders, showing up in two dozen other countries and in small numbers in the United States. Although trials of a number of vaccines indicate they can protect against severe illness even when they do not prevent infection with the variant, most of the world has not been inoculated. That means even people who had recovered and thought they were safe for now might still be at risk and that world leaders might, once again, be lifting restrictions too soon. “You need vaccines to get in the way of these things,” said William Hanage, a public health researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, speaking of variants that might cause reinfections. “The immunity you get with your cemeteries running out of room, even that will not be enough to protect you.” That danger of new variants has not been lost on scientists around the world. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pleaded with Americans this week not to let their guards down. “Please hear me clearly,” she said. “At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we’ve gained.” Brazilians hoped they had seen the worst of the outbreak last year. Manaus, capital of the northern state of Amazonas, was hit so hard in April and May that scientists wondered if the city might have reached herd immunity. But then in September, cases in the state began rising again, perplexing health officials. An attempt by Amazonas Gov. Wilson Lima to impose a new quarantine ahead of the Christmas holiday was met with fierce resistance by business owners and prominent politicians close to President Jair Bolsonaro. By January, scientists had discovered that a new variant, which became known as P.1, had become dominant in the state. Within weeks, its danger became clear as hospitals in the city ran out of oxygen amid a crush of patients, leading scores to suffocate to death. Dr. Antonio Souza remains haunted by the horrified faces of his colleagues and relatives of patients when it became clear his Manaus hospital’s oxygen supply had been exhausted. He thinks about the patient he sedated, to spare her an agonizing death, when the oxygen ran out at another clinic. “Nobody should ever have to make that decision,” he said. “It’s too terrible.” Maria Glaudimar, a nurse in Manaus, said she felt trapped in a nightmare early this year with no end in sight. At work, patients and their relatives pleaded for oxygen, and all the intensive care beds were full. At home, her son caught tuberculosis after contracting COVID-19, and her husband shed 22 pounds as he fought the virus. “No one was prepared for this,” Glaudimar said. “It was a horror film.” Since then, the coronavirus crisis has eased somewhat in Amazonas but worsened in most of Brazil. Scientists have scrambled to learn more about the variant and to track its spread across the country. But limited resources for testing have kept them behind the curve as they try to determine what role it is playing. Anderson Brito, a Brazilian virus expert at Yale University, said his lab alone sequenced almost half as many coronavirus genomes as all of Brazil had. While the United States has done genetic sequencing on roughly one in 200 confirmed cases, Brazil sequences about one in 3,000. The variant spread quickly. By the end of January, a study by government researchers found it was present in 91% of samples sequenced in the state of Amazonas. By the end of February, health officials had reported cases of the P.1 variant in 21 of 26 Brazilian states, but without more testing it is hard to gauge its prevalence. Throughout the pandemic, researchers have said that COVID-19 reinfections appear to be extremely rare, which has allowed people who recover to presume they have immunity, at least for a while. But that was before P.1 appeared and doctors and nurses began to notice something strange. João Alho, a doctor in Santarém, a city in Pará, a state that borders Amazonas, said that several colleagues who recovered from COVID-19 months ago had fallen ill again and tested positive. Juliana Cunha, a nurse in Rio de Janeiro who has been working at COVID-19 testing centers, said she assumed she was safe after catching the virus in June. But in November, after experiencing mild symptoms, she tested positive again. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cunha, 23, said. “It must be the variants.” But there is no way to be sure what is happening to people who are reinfected, unless both their old and new samples are kept, genetically sequenced and compared. One way to tamp down the surge would be through vaccinations, but the rollout in Brazil, as in so many countries, has been slow. Brazil began vaccinating priority groups, including health care professionals and the elderly, in late January. But the government has failed to secure a large enough number of doses. Wealthier countries have snapped up most of the available supply, while Bolsonaro has been skeptical both of the disease’s impact and of vaccines. Just over 5.8 million Brazilians — roughly 2.6% of the population — had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Tuesday, according to the health ministry. Only about 1.5 million had received both doses. The country is currently using the Chinese-made CoronaVac — which laboratory tests suggest is less effective against P.1 than against other variants — and the one made by British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Margareth Dalcolmo, a pulmonologist at Fiocruz, a prominent scientific research center, said Brazil’s failure to mount a robust vaccination campaign set the stage for the current crisis. “We should be vaccinating more than a million people per day,” she said. “That is the truth. We aren’t, not because we don’t know how to do it, but because we don’t have enough vaccines.” Other countries should take heed, said Ester Sabino, an infectious disease researcher at the University of São Paulo who is among the leading experts on the P.1 variant. “You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new variant appears,” she said. “It will get there one day.” Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello, who called the variant a “new stage” of the pandemic, said last week that the government was ramping up its efforts and hopes to vaccinate roughly half of its population by June and the rest by the end of the year. But many Brazilians have little faith in a government led by a president who has sabotaged lockdowns, repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus and promoted untested remedies long after scientists said they clearly did not work. Just last week, the president spoke dismissively of masks, which are among the best defenses to curb contagion, claiming that they are harmful to children, causing headaches and difficulty concentrating. Pazuello’s vaccine projections have also been met with skepticism. The government last week placed an order for 20 million doses of an Indian vaccine that has not completed clinical trials. That prompted a federal prosecutor to argue in a legal filing that the $286 million purchase “puts millions of lives at risk.” Even if it proves effective, it will be too late for many. Tony Maquiné, a 39-year-old marketing specialist in Manaus, lost a grandmother, an uncle, two aunts and a cousin in the span of a few weeks during the latest surge of cases. He said time has become a blur of frantic efforts to find hospitals with free beds for the living, while arranging funerals for the dead. “It was a nightmare,” Maquiné said. “I’m scared of what lies ahead.”

Brazil’s Covid crisis is a warning to the whole world, scientists say

Brazil variant of COVID-19 that has been labelled P1 is about twice as transmissible as some of the other wireless trains and is said to be more likely to evade the natural immunity system.

Brazilian P1 COVID-19 variant raises concerns

Brazil registers the highest single-day deaths on Tuesday i.e. 1641. Over 257,000 people have died in the country due to COVID-19 infections.

Second COVID wave leaves Brazil's healthcare in shambles

Brazil posted a trade surplus of $1.2 billion in February, more than the consensus forecast in a poll for a $900 million surplus, but around half of the $2.3 billion surpluses in the same month last year.

World Business Watch: Brazil posts $1.2 billion trade surplus in February

It is also able to evade between 25% and 61% of protective immunity from previous infection, according to new research.

Brazilian P1 variant may spread more easily

In just a matter of weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so familiar that you can hear their inscrutable alphanumeric names regularly uttered on television news.

B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain, has demonstrated the power to spread far and fast. In South Africa, a mutant called B.1.351 can dodge human antibodies, blunting the effectiveness of some vaccines.

Scientists have also had their eye on a third concerning variant that arose in Brazil, called P.1. Research had been slower on P.1 since its discovery in late December, leaving scientists unsure of just how much to worry about it.

“I’ve been holding my breath,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, a public health researcher at the Broad Institute.

Now three studies offer a sobering history of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It likely arose there in November and then fueled a record-breaking spike of coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city due in part to increased contagiousness, the research found.

But it also gained the ability to infect some people who had immunity from previous bouts of COVID-19. And laboratory experiments suggest that P.1 could weaken the protective effect of a Chinese vaccine now in use in Brazil.

The new studies have yet to be published in scientific journals. Their authors caution that findings on cells in laboratories do not always translate to the real world, and they’ve only begun to understand P.1’s behaviour.

“The findings apply to Manaus, but I don’t know if they apply to other places,” said Nuno Faria, a virus expert at Imperial College London who helped lead much of the new research.

But even with the mysteries that remain around P.1, experts said it is a variant to take seriously. “It’s right to be worried about P.1, and this data gives us the reason why,” said William Hanage, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

P.1 is now spreading across the rest of Brazil and has been found in 24 other countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six cases in five states: Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

To reduce the risks of P.1 outbreaks and reinfections, Faria said it was important to double down on every measure we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Masks and social distancing can work against P.1. And vaccination can help drive down its transmission and protect those who do get infected from severe disease.

“The ultimate message is that you need to step up all the vaccination efforts as soon as possible,” he said. “You need to be one step ahead of the virus.”

Faria and his colleagues started tracking the coronavirus when it exploded in Brazil last spring. Manaus, a city of 2 million in the Brazilian Amazon, was hit particularly hard. At its springtime peak, the cemeteries of Manaus were overwhelmed by the bodies of the dead.

But after a peak in late April, Manaus seemed to have gotten past the worst of the pandemic. Some scientists thought that the drop meant Manaus had gained herd immunity.

Faria and his colleagues looked for coronavirus antibodies in samples from a Manaus blood bank in June and October. They determined that roughly three-quarters of the residents of Manaus had been infected.

But near the end of 2020, new cases began surging again. “There were actually far more cases than in the previous peak of cases, which had been in late April,” Faria said. “And that was very puzzling to us.”

Faria and his colleagues wondered if new variants might be partly to blame for the resurgence. In Britain, researchers were finding that B.1.1.7 was surging across the country.

To search for variants, Faria and his colleagues started a new genome sequencing effort in the city. While B.1.1.7 had arrived in other parts of Brazil, they didn’t find it in Manaus. Instead, they found a variant no one had seen before.

Many variants in their samples shared a set of 21 mutations not seen in other viruses circulating in Brazil. Faria sent a text message to a colleague: “I think I’m looking at something really strange, and I’m quite worried about this.”

A few mutations, in particular, worried him, because scientists had already found them in either B.1.1.7 or B.1.351. Experiments suggested that some of the mutations might make the variants better able to infect cells. Other mutations let them evade antibodies from previous infections or produced by vaccines.

As Faria and his colleagues analyzed their results, researchers in Japan were making a similar discovery. Four tourists returning home from a trip to the Amazon on Jan. 4 tested positive for the coronavirus. Genome sequencing revealed the same set of mutations Faria and his colleagues were seeing in Brazil.

Faria and his colleagues posted a description of P.1 on an online virology forum on Jan. 12. They then investigated why P.1 was so common. Its mutations may have made it more contagious, or it might have been lucky. By sheer chance, the variant might have shown up in Manaus just as the city was getting more relaxed about public health measures.

It was also possible that P.1 became common because it could reinfect people. Normally, coronavirus reinfections are rare, because the antibodies produced by the body after infection are potent for months. But it was possible that P.1 carried mutations that made it harder for those antibodies to latch onto it, allowing it to slip into cells and cause new infections.

The researchers tested these possibilities by tracking P.1 from its earliest samples in December. By early January, it made up 87% of samples. By February it had taken over completely.

Combining the data from genomes, antibodies and medical records in Manaus, the researchers concluded that P.1 conquered the city thanks not to luck but biology: Its mutations helped it spread. Like B.1.1.7, it can infect more people, on average, than other variants can. They estimate it is somewhere between 1.4 and 2.2 times more transmissible than other lineages of coronaviruses.

But it also gets an edge from mutations that let it escape antibodies from other coronaviruses. They estimate that in 100 people who were infected in Manaus last year, somewhere between 25 and 61 of them may have been reinfected by P.1.

The researchers found support for this conclusion in an experiment in which they mixed P.1 viruses with antibodies from Brazilians who had COVID-19 last year. They found that the effectiveness of their antibodies dropped sixfold against P.1 compared with other coronaviruses. That drop might mean that at least some people would be vulnerable to new infections from P.1.

“There seems to be an increasing body of evidence that suggests that most of the cases associated with the second wave are indeed sort of reinfections,” Faria said.

Faria and other researchers are now looking across Brazil to observe P.1’s spread. Dr. Ester Sabino, an infectious disease expert at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine, said that one of the new outbreaks arose in Araraquara, a Brazilian city of 223,000 people that did not have high rates of COVID-19 before P.1 arrived.

If people in Araraquara did not have high levels of antibodies before P.1’s arrivals, she said, that suggests that the variant may be able to spread in places without Manaus’ extreme history. “This might happen in any other place,” she said.

Michael Worobey, a virus expert at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it was time to pay attention to P.1 in the United States. He expected it would become more common in the United States, although it would have to compete with B.1.1.7, which may soon become the predominant variant in much of the nation.

“At the very least, it’s going to be one of the contenders,” Worobey said.

In their experiments, Faria and his colleagues also tested antibodies from eight people who received CoronaVac, a Chinese-made vaccine that has been used in Brazil. They found that the vaccine-generated antibodies were less effective at stopping the P.1 variant than other types.

Faria cautioned that these results, derived from cells in test tubes, don’t necessarily mean that vaccines will be less effective at protecting real people from P.1. Vaccines may very well provide strong protection from P.1 even if the antibodies they generate aren’t quite as potent. And even if the variant manages to infect vaccinated people, they will likely remain shielded from a severe bout of COVID-19.

For Sabino, the ultimate importance of P.1 is the threat that concerning variants pose when they can pop up anywhere in the world.

“It’s just a matter of time and chance,” she said.

In just a matter of weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so familiar that you can hear their inscrutable alphanumeric names regularly uttered on television news.

In just a matter of weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so familiar that you can hear their inscrutable alphanumeric names regularly uttered on television news. B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain, has demonstrated the power to spread far and fast. In South Africa, a mutant called B.1.351 can dodge human antibodies, blunting the effectiveness of some vaccines. Scientists have also had their eye on a third concerning variant that arose in Brazil, called P.1. Research had been slower on P.1 since its discovery in late December, leaving scientists unsure of just how much to worry about it. “I’ve been holding my breath,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, a public health researcher at the Broad Institute. Now three studies offer a sobering history of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It likely arose there in November and then fueled a record-breaking spike of coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city due in part to increased contagiousness, the research found. But it also gained the ability to infect some people who had immunity from previous bouts of COVID-19. And laboratory experiments suggest that P.1 could weaken the protective effect of a Chinese vaccine now in use in Brazil. The new studies have yet to be published in scientific journals. Their authors caution that findings on cells in laboratories do not always translate to the real world, and they’ve only begun to understand P.1’s behaviour. “The findings apply to Manaus, but I don’t know if they apply to other places,” said Nuno Faria, a virus expert at Imperial College London who helped lead much of the new research. But even with the mysteries that remain around P.1, experts said it is a variant to take seriously. “It’s right to be worried about P.1, and this data gives us the reason why,” said William Hanage, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. P.1 is now spreading across the rest of Brazil and has been found in 24 other countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six cases in five states: Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Oklahoma. To reduce the risks of P.1 outbreaks and reinfections, Faria said it was important to double down on every measure we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Masks and social distancing can work against P.1. And vaccination can help drive down its transmission and protect those who do get infected from severe disease. “The ultimate message is that you need to step up all the vaccination efforts as soon as possible,” he said. “You need to be one step ahead of the virus.” Faria and his colleagues started tracking the coronavirus when it exploded in Brazil last spring. Manaus, a city of 2 million in the Brazilian Amazon, was hit particularly hard. At its springtime peak, the cemeteries of Manaus were overwhelmed by the bodies of the dead. But after a peak in late April, Manaus seemed to have gotten past the worst of the pandemic. Some scientists thought that the drop meant Manaus had gained herd immunity. Faria and his colleagues looked for coronavirus antibodies in samples from a Manaus blood bank in June and October. They determined that roughly three-quarters of the residents of Manaus had been infected. But near the end of 2020, new cases began surging again. “There were actually far more cases than in the previous peak of cases, which had been in late April,” Faria said. “And that was very puzzling to us.” Faria and his colleagues wondered if new variants might be partly to blame for the resurgence. In Britain, researchers were finding that B.1.1.7 was surging across the country. To search for variants, Faria and his colleagues started a new genome sequencing effort in the city. While B.1.1.7 had arrived in other parts of Brazil, they didn’t find it in Manaus. Instead, they found a variant no one had seen before. Many variants in their samples shared a set of 21 mutations not seen in other viruses circulating in Brazil. Faria sent a text message to a colleague: “I think I’m looking at something really strange, and I’m quite worried about this.” A few mutations, in particular, worried him, because scientists had already found them in either B.1.1.7 or B.1.351. Experiments suggested that some of the mutations might make the variants better able to infect cells. Other mutations let them evade antibodies from previous infections or produced by vaccines. As Faria and his colleagues analyzed their results, researchers in Japan were making a similar discovery. Four tourists returning home from a trip to the Amazon on Jan. 4 tested positive for the coronavirus. Genome sequencing revealed the same set of mutations Faria and his colleagues were seeing in Brazil. Faria and his colleagues posted a description of P.1 on an online virology forum on Jan. 12. They then investigated why P.1 was so common. Its mutations may have made it more contagious, or it might have been lucky. By sheer chance, the variant might have shown up in Manaus just as the city was getting more relaxed about public health measures. It was also possible that P.1 became common because it could reinfect people. Normally, coronavirus reinfections are rare, because the antibodies produced by the body after infection are potent for months. But it was possible that P.1 carried mutations that made it harder for those antibodies to latch onto it, allowing it to slip into cells and cause new infections. The researchers tested these possibilities by tracking P.1 from its earliest samples in December. By early January, it made up 87% of samples. By February it had taken over completely. Combining the data from genomes, antibodies and medical records in Manaus, the researchers concluded that P.1 conquered the city thanks not to luck but biology: Its mutations helped it spread. Like B.1.1.7, it can infect more people, on average, than other variants can. They estimate it is somewhere between 1.4 and 2.2 times more transmissible than other lineages of coronaviruses. But it also gets an edge from mutations that let it escape antibodies from other coronaviruses. They estimate that in 100 people who were infected in Manaus last year, somewhere between 25 and 61 of them may have been reinfected by P.1. The researchers found support for this conclusion in an experiment in which they mixed P.1 viruses with antibodies from Brazilians who had COVID-19 last year. They found that the effectiveness of their antibodies dropped sixfold against P.1 compared with other coronaviruses. That drop might mean that at least some people would be vulnerable to new infections from P.1. “There seems to be an increasing body of evidence that suggests that most of the cases associated with the second wave are indeed sort of reinfections,” Faria said. Faria and other researchers are now looking across Brazil to observe P.1’s spread. Dr. Ester Sabino, an infectious disease expert at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine, said that one of the new outbreaks arose in Araraquara, a Brazilian city of 223,000 people that did not have high rates of COVID-19 before P.1 arrived. If people in Araraquara did not have high levels of antibodies before P.1’s arrivals, she said, that suggests that the variant may be able to spread in places without Manaus’ extreme history. “This might happen in any other place,” she said. Michael Worobey, a virus expert at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it was time to pay attention to P.1 in the United States. He expected it would become more common in the United States, although it would have to compete with B.1.1.7, which may soon become the predominant variant in much of the nation. “At the very least, it’s going to be one of the contenders,” Worobey said. In their experiments, Faria and his colleagues also tested antibodies from eight people who received CoronaVac, a Chinese-made vaccine that has been used in Brazil. They found that the vaccine-generated antibodies were less effective at stopping the P.1 variant than other types. Faria cautioned that these results, derived from cells in test tubes, don’t necessarily mean that vaccines will be less effective at protecting real people from P.1. Vaccines may very well provide strong protection from P.1 even if the antibodies they generate aren’t quite as potent. And even if the variant manages to infect vaccinated people, they will likely remain shielded from a severe bout of COVID-19. For Sabino, the ultimate importance of P.1 is the threat that concerning variants pose when they can pop up anywhere in the world. “It’s just a matter of time and chance,” she said.

Virus variant in Brazil infected many who had already recovered from Covid-19

The once pristine beaches of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil have been engulfed in plastic waste, tons of trashes thrown into the ocean each year suffocating marine life and polluting the beaches and waters.

Environmentalists in Brazil call for action to clean up beaches

When it comes to Covid-19 <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus-vaccine">vaccination</a> programs, there are some countries that have exceeded expectations and others that have fallen surprisingly short. And then there is Brazil.

Vaccinating over 210 million people may sound daunting, but for Brazil it really shouldn’t be. With one of the largest universal, free-of-charge public health systems in the world, the country has a distinguished track record of vaccinations and disease control. The National Immunization Program, founded in 1973, helped to eradicate polio and rubella in the country and currently offers more than 20 vaccines free in every municipality.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/modernas-coronavirus-vaccine-side-effects-are-severe-but-worth-it-cdc-study-367057" hreflang="en">Moderna's coronavirus vaccine side effects are severe, but worth it: CDC study</a>

Along with the infrastructure to distribute vaccines, there’s also the expertise to do so: In 1980, the country vaccinated 17.5 million children against polio in a single day. In 2010, over 89 million doses of the swine flu vaccine were administered in under four months. And last year, more than 70 million Brazilians received their annual shot against influenza.

We take immunization so seriously here that we even have a mascot for vaccination campaigns, an adorable six-foot smiling white blob named “Zé Gotinha,” Joe Droplet. (This glorious national hero apparently refused to shake hands with President Jair Bolsonaro during an official event in December.)

But despite these advantages, Brazil’s vaccine rollout has been painfully slow, inconsistent and marred by shortages. The nationwide program began on Jan. 18, later than over 50 countries, and at its current rate will take more than four years to complete. Several major cities, such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, have already had to stop their campaigns because of problems in supply.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/astrazeneca-sells-stake-in-moderna-for-more-than-1-billion-report-367063" hreflang="en">AstraZeneca sells stake in Moderna for more than $1 billion: Report</a>

In a country where the pandemic has wrought terrible damage — 250,000 people have died, the second-highest total in the world, after the United States, as cities along the Amazon River like Manaus have been abandoned to their fate — the failure amounts to a disaster.

So what went wrong? Perhaps we should look to Joe Droplet: He seems to know exactly who to blame.

From the beginning, Bolsonaro’s government downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. The president fought against masks and social distancing measures, comparing the coronavirus to rain that would fall on most people while drowning just some of them. (“It’s no use staying home crying,” he recently said, after the country registered 1,452 deaths on a single day.) In the middle of the outbreak, he managed to get rid of two health ministers — both doctors — who threatened to contradict him, replacing them with an army general.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine-may-be-less-effective-in-obesity-study-367008" hreflang="en">Pfizer coronavirus vaccine may be less effective in obesity: Study</a>

What’s more, not only did Bolsonaro spend emergency funds to purchase and distribute unproven drugs against Covid-19, even after they had been shown to be ineffective, he also refused many offers of vaccine doses. In August, Pfizer offered Brazil 70 million doses, with delivery starting in December — but the government was not interested. The company made two other proposals, to no avail.

When pressed for an explanation, Brazil’s Health Ministry claimed that the terms of the contract — the same that applied to all countries — were “abusive.” Pfizer, Bolsonaro complained, wouldn’t take responsibility “if you turn into Superman, if a woman grows a beard or a man starts to talk with a high-pitched voice.” Instead, he kept up his efforts to discredit vaccination, promoting an imaginary “early treatment” for Covid-19.

Bolsonaro even found time to oppose a proposal, brought to the World Health Organization by India and South Africa, to temporarily lift patent restrictions on coronavirus vaccines. Allowing developing countries — including Brazil — to manufacture vaccines sooner and at much greater scale apparently held no interest.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-to-get-4-million-jj-vaccine-by-tuesday-fauci-hopes-to-vaccinate-children-by-2021-end-366999" hreflang="en">US to get 4 million J&amp;J vaccine by Tuesday; Fauci hopes to vaccinate children by 2021 end</a>

Eventually the federal government, under public pressure, started to plan a vaccination program. But it focused on a single manufacturer, AstraZeneca, whose vaccine trials ended up taking longer than others. Other difficulties surfaced later. After the approval of the vaccine in January, there was a shipment delay. And the flight bearing two million doses from India was postponed for a week.

Bolsonaro also spent months attacking the other vaccine now available in Brazil — CoronaVac, developed by the Chinese company Sinovac — because it had been backed by São Paulo’s governor, a political rival and likely competitor in the 2022 presidential race. (Bolsonaro even celebrated the death of a participant in the CoronaVac trial, later deemed to be unrelated to the vaccine.)

When the AstraZeneca vaccine failed to materialize quickly, Bolsonaro had to turn to the supply of the CoronaVac that São Paulo’s governor had managed to amass. There were no words of thanks.

Brazil is now gradually expanding local production, while more doses are on their way from India and the Covax Facility, a global vaccine distribution program. But everything is happening in slow motion. Two million doses now, four million a month later.

The shortage of vaccines at least conceals the fact that the government probably hadn’t secured enough syringes to administer them. Truly, it’s little wonder that the government’s handling of the pandemic was judged by the Lowy Institute, a research institute in Australia, to be the worst in the world.

Bolsonaro, through ineptitude and malice, has squandered the country’s resources to ruinous effect. Joe Droplet was right to ignore him. If only the rest of us could, too.

When it comes to Covid-19 vaccination programs, there are some countries that have exceeded expectations and others that have fallen surprisingly short. And then there is Brazil.

When it comes to Covid-19 vaccination programs, there are some countries that have exceeded expectations and others that have fallen surprisingly short. And then there is Brazil. Vaccinating over 210 million people may sound daunting, but for Brazil it really shouldn’t be. With one of the largest universal, free-of-charge public health systems in the world, the country has a distinguished track record of vaccinations and disease control. The National Immunization Program, founded in 1973, helped to eradicate polio and rubella in the country and currently offers more than 20 vaccines free in every municipality. Also read | Moderna's coronavirus vaccine side effects are severe, but worth it: CDC study Along with the infrastructure to distribute vaccines, there’s also the expertise to do so: In 1980, the country vaccinated 17.5 million children against polio in a single day. In 2010, over 89 million doses of the swine flu vaccine were administered in under four months. And last year, more than 70 million Brazilians received their annual shot against influenza. We take immunization so seriously here that we even have a mascot for vaccination campaigns, an adorable six-foot smiling white blob named “Zé Gotinha,” Joe Droplet. (This glorious national hero apparently refused to shake hands with President Jair Bolsonaro during an official event in December.) But despite these advantages, Brazil’s vaccine rollout has been painfully slow, inconsistent and marred by shortages. The nationwide program began on Jan. 18, later than over 50 countries, and at its current rate will take more than four years to complete. Several major cities, such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, have already had to stop their campaigns because of problems in supply. Also read | AstraZeneca sells stake in Moderna for more than $1 billion: Report In a country where the pandemic has wrought terrible damage — 250,000 people have died, the second-highest total in the world, after the United States, as cities along the Amazon River like Manaus have been abandoned to their fate — the failure amounts to a disaster. So what went wrong? Perhaps we should look to Joe Droplet: He seems to know exactly who to blame. From the beginning, Bolsonaro’s government downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic. The president fought against masks and social distancing measures, comparing the coronavirus to rain that would fall on most people while drowning just some of them. (“It’s no use staying home crying,” he recently said, after the country registered 1,452 deaths on a single day.) In the middle of the outbreak, he managed to get rid of two health ministers — both doctors — who threatened to contradict him, replacing them with an army general. Also read | Pfizer coronavirus vaccine may be less effective in obesity: Study What’s more, not only did Bolsonaro spend emergency funds to purchase and distribute unproven drugs against Covid-19, even after they had been shown to be ineffective, he also refused many offers of vaccine doses. In August, Pfizer offered Brazil 70 million doses, with delivery starting in December — but the government was not interested. The company made two other proposals, to no avail. When pressed for an explanation, Brazil’s Health Ministry claimed that the terms of the contract — the same that applied to all countries — were “abusive.” Pfizer, Bolsonaro complained, wouldn’t take responsibility “if you turn into Superman, if a woman grows a beard or a man starts to talk with a high-pitched voice.” Instead, he kept up his efforts to discredit vaccination, promoting an imaginary “early treatment” for Covid-19. Bolsonaro even found time to oppose a proposal, brought to the World Health Organization by India and South Africa, to temporarily lift patent restrictions on coronavirus vaccines. Allowing developing countries — including Brazil — to manufacture vaccines sooner and at much greater scale apparently held no interest. Also read | US to get 4 million J&J vaccine by Tuesday; Fauci hopes to vaccinate children by 2021 end Eventually the federal government, under public pressure, started to plan a vaccination program. But it focused on a single manufacturer, AstraZeneca, whose vaccine trials ended up taking longer than others. Other difficulties surfaced later. After the approval of the vaccine in January, there was a shipment delay. And the flight bearing two million doses from India was postponed for a week. Bolsonaro also spent months attacking the other vaccine now available in Brazil — CoronaVac, developed by the Chinese company Sinovac — because it had been backed by São Paulo’s governor, a political rival and likely competitor in the 2022 presidential race. (Bolsonaro even celebrated the death of a participant in the CoronaVac trial, later deemed to be unrelated to the vaccine.) When the AstraZeneca vaccine failed to materialize quickly, Bolsonaro had to turn to the supply of the CoronaVac that São Paulo’s governor had managed to amass. There were no words of thanks. Brazil is now gradually expanding local production, while more doses are on their way from India and the Covax Facility, a global vaccine distribution program. But everything is happening in slow motion. Two million doses now, four million a month later. The shortage of vaccines at least conceals the fact that the government probably hadn’t secured enough syringes to administer them. Truly, it’s little wonder that the government’s handling of the pandemic was judged by the Lowy Institute, a research institute in Australia, to be the worst in the world. Bolsonaro, through ineptitude and malice, has squandered the country’s resources to ruinous effect. Joe Droplet was right to ignore him. If only the rest of us could, too.

Brazil is brilliant at vaccinations. So what went wrong this time?

Cities and states in Brazil, which is struggling to contain a new wave of rising <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">coronavirus infections</a>, have reimposed restrictions to contain the spread of the deadly virus.&nbsp;

The country's death poll has surpassed 250,000 and the restrictions have been placed as intensive care units in the country have reached the point of saturation.&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/brazil-carnival-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic-363803/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Despite having the second-highest death toll in the world, the federal government and local administrations are at odds with each other on imposing restrictions, with President Jair Bolsonaro threatening to cut off funds to states that are announcing curfews and lockdowns.&nbsp;

"From now on, governors who close down their states will have to provide for their own emergency aid," Bolsonaro had said on Friday.&nbsp;

This week, Sao Paulo ordered bars and restaurants to shut down at 8:00 pm, while the state of Parana announced the closure of non-essential businesses and placed a curfew from 8:00 pm to 5:00 am from Friday, reports news agency AFP.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/brazil-signs-deal-with-indias-bharat-biotech-for-20-million-covid-19-vaccine-doses-366357">Brazil signs deal with India's Bharat Biotech for 20 million Covid-19 vaccine doses</a>

Parana's neighbouring the Rio Grande also imposed the same measure.&nbsp;

Schools and all non-essential businesses will be closed from Sunday in the capital Brasilia.

"Our health system is about to collapse," Bahia Governor Rui Costa said Thursday.

"Brazil is going to be mired in chaos in two weeks. The problem is getting worse across the country... We've never had a situation like this."

With average deaths of 1,153, Brazil on Friday recorded its worst weekly death.&nbsp;

Cities and states in Brazil, which is struggling to contain a new wave of rising coronavirus infections, have reimposed restrictions to contain the spread of the deadly virus.

Cities and states in Brazil, which is struggling to contain a new wave of rising coronavirus infections, have reimposed restrictions to contain the spread of the deadly virus. The country's death poll has surpassed 250,000 and the restrictions have been placed as intensive care units in the country have reached the point of saturation. Watch | Despite having the second-highest death toll in the world, the federal government and local administrations are at odds with each other on imposing restrictions, with President Jair Bolsonaro threatening to cut off funds to states that are announcing curfews and lockdowns. "From now on, governors who close down their states will have to provide for their own emergency aid," Bolsonaro had said on Friday. This week, Sao Paulo ordered bars and restaurants to shut down at 8:00 pm, while the state of Parana announced the closure of non-essential businesses and placed a curfew from 8:00 pm to 5:00 am from Friday, reports news agency AFP. Also read | Brazil signs deal with India's Bharat Biotech for 20 million Covid-19 vaccine doses Parana's neighbouring the Rio Grande also imposed the same measure. Schools and all non-essential businesses will be closed from Sunday in the capital Brasilia. "Our health system is about to collapse," Bahia Governor Rui Costa said Thursday. "Brazil is going to be mired in chaos in two weeks. The problem is getting worse across the country... We've never had a situation like this." With average deaths of 1,153, Brazil on Friday recorded its worst weekly death.

Brazil: Cities, states reimpose restrictions amid Covid-19 surge despite Bolsonaro's threats

The Indian government has announced the price for the Astra Zeneca vaccine little more than $3 per dose. How much the other countries are paying for the same vaccine?

What are countries paying for the Covid-19 vaccine?

In this year's first lift-off of the Indian space, research origination launched Brazil's primary satellite Amazonia-1. The Satellite onboard the polar satellite launch vehicle C-51 with 18 co-passenger satellites has been launched from Satish Dhawan space center in Sriharikota.

Brazil's primary satellite Amazonia-1 Satellite launches from ISRO, India

A strict 25 hours lockdown has been imposed in the Brazillian capital of Brasilia to curb a worsening COVID-19 outbreak that is filled its intensive care units to near filled capacity now. Brazilian governor issues 24-hour lockdown in Brazil's capital and remains effective for 15 days.

Lockdown restrictions has been imposed in Brazillian capital of Brasilia to curb a worsening COVID-19 outbreak

Brazil's health ministry on Thursday signed a deal with India's Bharat Biotech to purchase 20 million doses of Covaxin, a <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus-vaccine">coronavirus vaccine</a>.&nbsp;

The news came a day before Brazil marks one year since the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the country after a Sao Paulo businessman returning from a trip to Italy tested positive.

Watch |&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/uk-south-africa-brazil-mutated-covid-strains-reached-india-364176/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

The health ministry in a statement said the 1.6 billion reais ($290,000) contract will assure the country 20 million shots, with the first eight million expected to arrive in March.

Also read | <a href="&lt;div class=&quot;videoWrapper trancodeVideo&quot;&gt;&lt;iframe src=&quot;https://www.wionews.com/world/how-pfizer-tried-to-bully-argentina-and-brazil-in-exchange-for-vaccines-366037/embed&quot; width=&quot;560&quot; height=&quot;350&quot; style=&quot;width:100%;max-width:560px;&quot; class=&quot;includeVideo&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; autoplay=1 allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;/div&gt;">How Pfizer tried to bully Argentina and Brazil in exchange for vaccines</a>

The next batch of another eight million will likely reach Brazil in April and May.

The deal comes as Brazil on Thursday crossed the grim milestone of 250,000 deaths due to novel coronavirus with 1,541 fatalities in the last 24 hours, the second-highest daily death toll.&nbsp;

This has been the deadliest week so far in the country with a daily average of 1,149 deaths over the last seven days, according to the official data.&nbsp;

So far, Brazil has vaccinated less than four cent of its population of 210 people and certain cities have also stopped immunisation campaigns due to the unavailability of vaccine supplies.&nbsp;

The South American country has seen 10,390,461 Covid-19 infections, the third-highest globally after the United States and India.&nbsp;

 
&nbsp;

Brazil's health ministry on Thursday signed a deal with India's Bharat Biotech to purchase 20 million doses of Covaxin, a coronavirus vaccine. The news came a day before Brazil marks one year since the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the country after a Sao Paulo businessman returning from a trip to Italy tested positive.

Brazil's health ministry on Thursday signed a deal with India's Bharat Biotech to purchase 20 million doses of Covaxin, a coronavirus vaccine. The news came a day before Brazil marks one year since the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the country after a Sao Paulo businessman returning from a trip to Italy tested positive. Watch | The health ministry in a statement said the 1.6 billion reais ($290,000) contract will assure the country 20 million shots, with the first eight million expected to arrive in March. Also read | How Pfizer tried to bully Argentina and Brazil in exchange for vaccines The next batch of another eight million will likely reach Brazil in April and May. The deal comes as Brazil on Thursday crossed the grim milestone of 250,000 deaths due to novel coronavirus with 1,541 fatalities in the last 24 hours, the second-highest daily death toll. This has been the deadliest week so far in the country with a daily average of 1,149 deaths over the last seven days, according to the official data. So far, Brazil has vaccinated less than four cent of its population of 210 people and certain cities have also stopped immunisation campaigns due to the unavailability of vaccine supplies. The South American country has seen 10,390,461 Covid-19 infections, the third-highest globally after the United States and India.

Brazil signs deal with India's Bharat Biotech for 20 million Covid-19 vaccine doses

Feeling frustrated and stressed out? Brazilians now have a place to vent their anger and fury in the newly opened "Rage Room."

Feeling angry? The 'Rage Room' opens in Sao Paulo

Rio carnival was cancelled this year in Brazil and understandably so due to the coronavirus pandemic but virus restrictions have failed to damp in spirits of the revellers, many of whom are also pets and furry companions.

Brazil: Carnival amid the Coronavirus pandemic

A girl born without arms is now a ballerina in Brazil. Her indomitable spirit has resonated with many and turned her social media star.

Ballerina Vitoria Bueno without arms becomes a role model for many

Tribal leaders and advocates claim medical teams working to immunise Brazil’s remote indigenous villages against the coronavirus have encountered fierce resistance in some communities where evangelical missionaries are stoking fears of the vaccine.&nbsp;

On the São Francisco reservation in the state of Amazonas, Jamamadi villagers sent health workers packing with bows and arrows when they visited by helicopter this month, said Claudemir da Silva, an Apurinã leader representing indigenous communities on the Purus river, a tributary of the Xingú.&nbsp;

“It’s not happening in all villages, just in those that have missionaries or evangelical chapels where pastors are convincing the people not to receive the vaccine, that they will turn into an alligator and other crazy ideas,” he said by phone.&nbsp;

That has added to fears that Covid-19 could roar through Brazil’s more than 800,000 indigenous people, whose communal living and often precarious healthcare make them a priority in the national immunisation programme.&nbsp;

Tribal leaders blame Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and some of his avid supporters in the evangelical community for stoking skepticism about coronavirus vaccines, despite a national death toll that lags only the United States.&nbsp;

“Religious fundamentalists and evangelical missionaries are preaching against the vaccine,” said Dinamam Tuxá, a leader of APIB, Brazil’s largest indigenous organization.&nbsp;

The Association of Brazilian Anthropologists denounced unspecified religious groups in a statement on Tuesday for spreading false conspiracy theories to 'sabotage' the vaccination of indigenous people.&nbsp;

Many pastors of Brazil’s urban evangelical megachurches are urging followers to get vaccinated, but they say missionaries in remote territories have not gotten the message.&nbsp;

“Unfortunately, some pastors, who lack wisdom, are spreading misinformation to our indigenous brethren,” said Pastor Mario Jorge Conceição of the Assembly of God Traditional Church in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state.

Tribal leaders and advocates claim medical teams working to immunise Brazil’s remote indigenous villages against the coronavirus have encountered fierce resistance in some communities where evangelical missionaries are stoking fears of the vaccine.

Tribal leaders and advocates claim medical teams working to immunise Brazil’s remote indigenous villages against the coronavirus have encountered fierce resistance in some communities where evangelical missionaries are stoking fears of the vaccine. On the São Francisco reservation in the state of Amazonas, Jamamadi villagers sent health workers packing with bows and arrows when they visited by helicopter this month, said Claudemir da Silva, an Apurinã leader representing indigenous communities on the Purus river, a tributary of the Xingú. “It’s not happening in all villages, just in those that have missionaries or evangelical chapels where pastors are convincing the people not to receive the vaccine, that they will turn into an alligator and other crazy ideas,” he said by phone. That has added to fears that Covid-19 could roar through Brazil’s more than 800,000 indigenous people, whose communal living and often precarious healthcare make them a priority in the national immunisation programme. Tribal leaders blame Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and some of his avid supporters in the evangelical community for stoking skepticism about coronavirus vaccines, despite a national death toll that lags only the United States. “Religious fundamentalists and evangelical missionaries are preaching against the vaccine,” said Dinamam Tuxá, a leader of APIB, Brazil’s largest indigenous organization. The Association of Brazilian Anthropologists denounced unspecified religious groups in a statement on Tuesday for spreading false conspiracy theories to 'sabotage' the vaccination of indigenous people. Many pastors of Brazil’s urban evangelical megachurches are urging followers to get vaccinated, but they say missionaries in remote territories have not gotten the message. “Unfortunately, some pastors, who lack wisdom, are spreading misinformation to our indigenous brethren,” said Pastor Mario Jorge Conceição of the Assembly of God Traditional Church in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state.

Missionaries stoking fears of vaccines in Amazon villages, say tribal leaders

Brazilian miner Vale said on Thursday it had reached a 37.7 billion real ($7 billion) agreement with prosecutors and the state of Minas Gerais to settle claims stemming from the collapse of a mining dam in 2019 which killed 270 people.

Brazil's Vale agrees to $7 billion Brumadinho disaster settlement

The Brazilian government on Wednesday said that it was negotiating with countries including India to buy 30 million doses of <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus-vaccine">coronavirus vaccines</a>.&nbsp;

The announcement comes after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India for exporting vaccines to Brazil.&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/brazil-starts-vaccination-drive-with-indian-jab-359042/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

India has earlier provided 2 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca's Covishield vaccine, manufactured by Serum Institute of India, to Brazil.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/with-a-hanuman-image-brazil-president-bolsonaro-thanks-pm-modi-for-covid-vaccines-358644">With a Hanuman image, Brazil President Bolsonaro thanks PM Modi for COVID vaccines</a>

Until now, only Oxford/AstraZeneca's and China's CoronaVac have been given approval in the country.

But, the Brazilian health ministry said on Wednesday that it is meeting Indian and Russian representatives on Wednesday to secure a deal to grant emergency authorisation to Russia's Sputnik V and India's Covaxin.&nbsp;

The deal would provide Brazil 10 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine and 20 million shots of Covaxin and will be delivered in February and March.

Brazil is the second-worst-hit country from the novel coronavirus with over 226,000 deaths.&nbsp;

Medical journal The Lancet this week published results of Sputnik V saying the vaccine has an efficacy of 91.6 per cent and is safe to use.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, India is continuing its 'vaccine diplomacy' by providing million of Covid-19 shots to neighbouring nations like Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Maldives, among others.&nbsp;

'Made in India' vaccines have also reached countries like Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, and Algeria.&nbsp;

India is one of the biggest vaccine manufacturers in the world and several nations have approached India for Covid-19 shots to battle the deadly virus that has wreaked havoc across the world.&nbsp;

 
&nbsp;

The Brazilian government on Wednesday said that it was negotiating with countries including India to buy 30 million doses of coronavirus vaccines. The announcement comes after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India for exporting vaccines to Brazil.

The Brazilian government on Wednesday said that it was negotiating with countries including India to buy 30 million doses of coronavirus vaccines. The announcement comes after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India for exporting vaccines to Brazil. Watch | India has earlier provided 2 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca's Covishield vaccine, manufactured by Serum Institute of India, to Brazil. Also read | With a Hanuman image, Brazil President Bolsonaro thanks PM Modi for COVID vaccines Until now, only Oxford/AstraZeneca's and China's CoronaVac have been given approval in the country. But, the Brazilian health ministry said on Wednesday that it is meeting Indian and Russian representatives on Wednesday to secure a deal to grant emergency authorisation to Russia's Sputnik V and India's Covaxin. The deal would provide Brazil 10 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine and 20 million shots of Covaxin and will be delivered in February and March. Brazil is the second-worst-hit country from the novel coronavirus with over 226,000 deaths. Medical journal The Lancet this week published results of Sputnik V saying the vaccine has an efficacy of 91.6 per cent and is safe to use. Meanwhile, India is continuing its 'vaccine diplomacy' by providing million of Covid-19 shots to neighbouring nations like Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Maldives, among others. 'Made in India' vaccines have also reached countries like Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, and Algeria. India is one of the biggest vaccine manufacturers in the world and several nations have approached India for Covid-19 shots to battle the deadly virus that has wreaked havoc across the world.

Brazil seeks to buy 30 million Covid-19 shots, including ones by India's Covaxin

Did Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro spend nearly $3 million on condensed milk?

Gravitas: Bolsonaro being slammed over condensed milk reports

Researchers in southern Brazil said they have discovered patients infected with two different strains of the new coronavirus simultaneously, reflecting concerns about the growing number of variants in the country.

Brazil researchers find people infected with two different COVID strains

Weeks after other Latin American countries began inoculating their citizens against coronavirus, Brazil finally administered its first shot on Jan. 17 using China`s Sinovac Biotech Ltd vaccine.

With efficacy of just over 50% - barely above Brazil`s threshold for regulatory approval - the Chinese shot was not the government`s first choice. But for now, there is little else available.

The country`s principle strategy - to manufacture 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca PLC vaccine locally - has been plagued by repeated delays. That effort isn`t expected to yield a finished product until March at the earliest.

AstraZeneca last week sent 2 million emergency doses to help Brazil get started. Meanwhile, Brazil`s Health Ministry has yet to sign deals with other vaccine makers.

The delays leave Brazil`s 210 million residents vulnerable to one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks on the planet. Brazil has tallied more than 218,000 COVID-19 fatalities, second only to the United States, and vaccinated less than 0.5% of its population.

Brazil`s vaccine rollout is just the latest misstep by its Health Ministry, which President Jair Bolsonaro has stocked with active-duty and retired military men with little public health experience. Those newcomers failed to grasp how quickly they needed to move to secure supplies amid heated global competition, and the importance of hedging their bets by striking deals with multiple manufacturers, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, pharmaceutical executives, diplomats and public health experts.

The ministry`s hesitance led to a missed opportunity back in August to order 70 million doses of a vaccine made by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE, with delivery starting in December, Pfizer said in a Jan. 7 statement.

Reuters also viewed an internal Health Ministry WhatsApp chat log, containing thousands of messages exchanged between senior officials last year as the global race for vaccines was heating up. The messages reveal that the new leadership team prioritized hydroxychloroquine and its cousin chloroquine, anti-malarial drugs championed by Bolsonaro as COVID-19 treatments despite little scientific evidence that they work.

"There was not sufficient focus on the vaccines, and a lack of technical vision," former Health Minister Nelson Teich told Reuters in an interview. Teich resigned in May in a disagreement with Bolsonaro over the hydroxychloroquine strategy.

Reuters sent a detailed list of questions for this story to the president`s office, which directed queries to the Health Ministry. The ministry did not respond.

Bolsonaro - who contracted the coronavirus last year and says he won`t take any COVID-19 shot - has defended his government`s vaccine rollout. "With respect, nobody would do better than my government is doing," he said in a Jan. 15 television interview.

While many nations have struggled to obtain vaccines as manufacturers strive to meet global demand, Brazil was better positioned than many. It has a long history of successful inoculation drives, and its state-funded production facilities can churn out vaccines at scale.

The federal government squandered those advantages, said Marcia Castro, a native Brazilian and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

"It`s a succession of errors that began from the start of the pandemic," she said. "And sadly, we`re measuring those mistakes in the number of deaths."

HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE OBSESSION

The AstraZeneca shot was supposed to be the main pillar of Brazil`s inoculation plan. According to a person involved in the deal, the Cambridge, England-based firm started talking to the Health Ministry about buying its vaccine around early June.

By then, Teich, the former health minister, was gone, replaced by Eduardo Pazuello, an Army general with no medical background. He quickly surrounded himself with other military men.

Negotiations with a ministry in upheaval were challenging, said the person familiar with the talks.

"There were no decisions being driven from the top," the person said, referring to Bolsonaro and the new ministry leadership.

The new officials were betting on hydroxychloroquine to mitigate Brazil`s pandemic, months of internal ministry WhatsApp chats viewed by Reuters revealed. Vaccines were mentioned infrequently in the chats, and at times with skepticism.

For example, on June 12, just days after being named deputy health minister, Elcio Franco, a retired Army colonel, alerted colleagues to a magazine article featuring AstraZeneca`s top Brazilian executive discussing the company`s vaccine. Franco expressed surprise that anyone might volunteer to participate in a vaccine trial.

"Who would be a guinea pig?" Franco wrote to his colleagues.

Franco did, however, express confidence in hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.

In June, COVID-19 deaths per day were reaching new highs in Brazil, official data showed. Franco claimed the opposite was true.

"Death rates are dropping dramatically due to Bolsonaro`s treatment protocol," he posted to the internal WhatsApp group on June 15. "Chloroquine is reversing the situation."

Franco did not respond to requests for comment through the Health Ministry or his LinkedIn account.

Brazil is now dealing with another surge of infections that`s pushing hospitals to the breaking point in several cities.

The Health Ministry has doubled down on anti-malarials. It publicly has urged infected people to take them soon after the onset of symptoms, and this month it sent 120,000 hydroxychloroquine pills to the badly hit northern state of Amazonas.

ASTRAZENECA TALKS

The person involved in the AstraZeneca talks said the Health Ministry`s leadership didn`t appear to grasp how quickly they`d need to act to secure a portion of the company`s limited supply.

In an initial meeting around the start of June, Pazuello, the new chief, showed interest in buying the vaccine, "and then got up and left the room," the person said. "He didn`t come to future calls."

Pazuello did not respond to requests for comment.

During ministry talks, AstraZeneca officials stressed the need for Brazil to make a financial commitment to guarantee delivery, the source said.

Ministry newcomers were still mastering government red tape, slowing the transaction, three people familiar with the situation said. The officials also proceeded cautiously to avoid any perception that they stood to profit from an unproven vaccine, following public graft scandals that had upended the country in recent years, the people said.

"They fear that people will assume there were kickbacks involved and their opponents will use it as a reason to launch an investigation," the source said.

Meanwhile, Britain, the European Union and the United States signed large deals with AstraZeneca.

With Brazil`s Health Ministry dithering, AstraZeneca reached out to officials in other parts of government to help unlock funding, said the person involved in the negotiations.

AstraZeneca did not respond to requests for comment.

On June 27, Brazil announced it had signed a $127 million agreement to start producing AstraZeneca`s vaccine at Rio de Janeiro`s federally funded Fiocruz Institute. Franco, the deputy health minister, said in late June that Brazil would initially produce some 30 million doses of the vaccine, half by December 2020, the rest in January 2021.

But Fiocruz has yet to manufacture a single dose because it lacks the active ingredient needed to make the vaccine.

The first shipment of that Chinese-made material is now delayed until around Feb. 8, Fiocruz said this week, without giving a reason. Fiocruz had previously predicted it would produce finished doses by March. It will update that forecast once the ingredient arrives, the statement said.

Yang Wanming, China`s ambassador to Brazil, said in a Tuesday press conference that "technical" obstacles were holding up the shipment. He did not elaborate.

With its timetable slipping, the Health Ministry in late December appealed to AstraZeneca, which was able to source 2 million ready-to-use shots from India. Those doses, which arrived in Brazil on Jan. 22, will immunize just 0.5% of Brazil`s population.

PFIZER FAILURE

Negotiations with Pfizer, meanwhile, have turned testy. The Health Ministry publicly has chastised the company for demanding Brazil sign a waiver shielding it from any potential liability regarding its vaccine.

Pfizer says many countries have signed the waiver; it blames Brazil`s government for dragging its feet. In a January statement, the company said it began talks in June with the Health Ministry, which it said passed on Pfizer`s August 15 offer to supply 70 million doses.

With those negotiations bogged down, Brazil`s government has turned to the Sinovac shot.

Bolsonaro, a vocal China critic, had vowed never to purchase the Chinese vaccine. On Jan. 13, he delighted in pointing out to supporters that the vaccine`s Brazilian trials, conducted at São Paulo`s Butantan Institute, a public biomedical research center, had shown a disappointing efficacy rate of 50.4%.

But with few options left, the Health Ministry recently announced a deal to purchase up to 100 million doses from Butantan.

On Jan. 18, Bolsonaro struck a more conciliatory tone. Sinovac`s shot, he told supporters, was "Brazil`s vaccine."

Weeks after other Latin American countries began inoculating their citizens against coronavirus, Brazil finally administered its first shot on Jan. 17 using China`s Sinovac Biotech Ltd vaccine.

Weeks after other Latin American countries began inoculating their citizens against coronavirus, Brazil finally administered its first shot on Jan. 17 using China`s Sinovac Biotech Ltd vaccine. With efficacy of just over 50% - barely above Brazil`s threshold for regulatory approval - the Chinese shot was not the government`s first choice. But for now, there is little else available. The country`s principle strategy - to manufacture 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca PLC vaccine locally - has been plagued by repeated delays. That effort isn`t expected to yield a finished product until March at the earliest. AstraZeneca last week sent 2 million emergency doses to help Brazil get started. Meanwhile, Brazil`s Health Ministry has yet to sign deals with other vaccine makers. The delays leave Brazil`s 210 million residents vulnerable to one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks on the planet. Brazil has tallied more than 218,000 COVID-19 fatalities, second only to the United States, and vaccinated less than 0.5% of its population. Brazil`s vaccine rollout is just the latest misstep by its Health Ministry, which President Jair Bolsonaro has stocked with active-duty and retired military men with little public health experience. Those newcomers failed to grasp how quickly they needed to move to secure supplies amid heated global competition, and the importance of hedging their bets by striking deals with multiple manufacturers, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, pharmaceutical executives, diplomats and public health experts. The ministry`s hesitance led to a missed opportunity back in August to order 70 million doses of a vaccine made by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE, with delivery starting in December, Pfizer said in a Jan. 7 statement. Reuters also viewed an internal Health Ministry WhatsApp chat log, containing thousands of messages exchanged between senior officials last year as the global race for vaccines was heating up. The messages reveal that the new leadership team prioritized hydroxychloroquine and its cousin chloroquine, anti-malarial drugs championed by Bolsonaro as COVID-19 treatments despite little scientific evidence that they work. "There was not sufficient focus on the vaccines, and a lack of technical vision," former Health Minister Nelson Teich told Reuters in an interview. Teich resigned in May in a disagreement with Bolsonaro over the hydroxychloroquine strategy. Reuters sent a detailed list of questions for this story to the president`s office, which directed queries to the Health Ministry. The ministry did not respond. Bolsonaro - who contracted the coronavirus last year and says he won`t take any COVID-19 shot - has defended his government`s vaccine rollout. "With respect, nobody would do better than my government is doing," he said in a Jan. 15 television interview. While many nations have struggled to obtain vaccines as manufacturers strive to meet global demand, Brazil was better positioned than many. It has a long history of successful inoculation drives, and its state-funded production facilities can churn out vaccines at scale. The federal government squandered those advantages, said Marcia Castro, a native Brazilian and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. "It`s a succession of errors that began from the start of the pandemic," she said. "And sadly, we`re measuring those mistakes in the number of deaths." HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE OBSESSION The AstraZeneca shot was supposed to be the main pillar of Brazil`s inoculation plan. According to a person involved in the deal, the Cambridge, England-based firm started talking to the Health Ministry about buying its vaccine around early June. By then, Teich, the former health minister, was gone, replaced by Eduardo Pazuello, an Army general with no medical background. He quickly surrounded himself with other military men. Negotiations with a ministry in upheaval were challenging, said the person familiar with the talks. "There were no decisions being driven from the top," the person said, referring to Bolsonaro and the new ministry leadership. The new officials were betting on hydroxychloroquine to mitigate Brazil`s pandemic, months of internal ministry WhatsApp chats viewed by Reuters revealed. Vaccines were mentioned infrequently in the chats, and at times with skepticism. For example, on June 12, just days after being named deputy health minister, Elcio Franco, a retired Army colonel, alerted colleagues to a magazine article featuring AstraZeneca`s top Brazilian executive discussing the company`s vaccine. Franco expressed surprise that anyone might volunteer to participate in a vaccine trial. "Who would be a guinea pig?" Franco wrote to his colleagues. Franco did, however, express confidence in hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. In June, COVID-19 deaths per day were reaching new highs in Brazil, official data showed. Franco claimed the opposite was true. "Death rates are dropping dramatically due to Bolsonaro`s treatment protocol," he posted to the internal WhatsApp group on June 15. "Chloroquine is reversing the situation." Franco did not respond to requests for comment through the Health Ministry or his LinkedIn account. Brazil is now dealing with another surge of infections that`s pushing hospitals to the breaking point in several cities. The Health Ministry has doubled down on anti-malarials. It publicly has urged infected people to take them soon after the onset of symptoms, and this month it sent 120,000 hydroxychloroquine pills to the badly hit northern state of Amazonas. ASTRAZENECA TALKS The person involved in the AstraZeneca talks said the Health Ministry`s leadership didn`t appear to grasp how quickly they`d need to act to secure a portion of the company`s limited supply. In an initial meeting around the start of June, Pazuello, the new chief, showed interest in buying the vaccine, "and then got up and left the room," the person said. "He didn`t come to future calls." Pazuello did not respond to requests for comment. During ministry talks, AstraZeneca officials stressed the need for Brazil to make a financial commitment to guarantee delivery, the source said. Ministry newcomers were still mastering government red tape, slowing the transaction, three people familiar with the situation said. The officials also proceeded cautiously to avoid any perception that they stood to profit from an unproven vaccine, following public graft scandals that had upended the country in recent years, the people said. "They fear that people will assume there were kickbacks involved and their opponents will use it as a reason to launch an investigation," the source said. Meanwhile, Britain, the European Union and the United States signed large deals with AstraZeneca. With Brazil`s Health Ministry dithering, AstraZeneca reached out to officials in other parts of government to help unlock funding, said the person involved in the negotiations. AstraZeneca did not respond to requests for comment. On June 27, Brazil announced it had signed a $127 million agreement to start producing AstraZeneca`s vaccine at Rio de Janeiro`s federally funded Fiocruz Institute. Franco, the deputy health minister, said in late June that Brazil would initially produce some 30 million doses of the vaccine, half by December 2020, the rest in January 2021. But Fiocruz has yet to manufacture a single dose because it lacks the active ingredient needed to make the vaccine. The first shipment of that Chinese-made material is now delayed until around Feb. 8, Fiocruz said this week, without giving a reason. Fiocruz had previously predicted it would produce finished doses by March. It will update that forecast once the ingredient arrives, the statement said. Yang Wanming, China`s ambassador to Brazil, said in a Tuesday press conference that "technical" obstacles were holding up the shipment. He did not elaborate. With its timetable slipping, the Health Ministry in late December appealed to AstraZeneca, which was able to source 2 million ready-to-use shots from India. Those doses, which arrived in Brazil on Jan. 22, will immunize just 0.5% of Brazil`s population. PFIZER FAILURE Negotiations with Pfizer, meanwhile, have turned testy. The Health Ministry publicly has chastised the company for demanding Brazil sign a waiver shielding it from any potential liability regarding its vaccine. Pfizer says many countries have signed the waiver; it blames Brazil`s government for dragging its feet. In a January statement, the company said it began talks in June with the Health Ministry, which it said passed on Pfizer`s August 15 offer to supply 70 million doses. With those negotiations bogged down, Brazil`s government has turned to the Sinovac shot. Bolsonaro, a vocal China critic, had vowed never to purchase the Chinese vaccine. On Jan. 13, he delighted in pointing out to supporters that the vaccine`s Brazilian trials, conducted at São Paulo`s Butantan Institute, a public biomedical research center, had shown a disappointing efficacy rate of 50.4%. But with few options left, the Health Ministry recently announced a deal to purchase up to 100 million doses from Butantan. On Jan. 18, Bolsonaro struck a more conciliatory tone. Sinovac`s shot, he told supporters, was "Brazil`s vaccine."

How Brazil missed its chance to secure COVID-19 vaccines

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Residents of the normally sleepy Brazilian town of Brumadinho turned out on the sreets for a vigil to remember the hundreds killed on the eve of the two year anniversary when a nearby dam collapsed and the world joined Brazil to watch in horror as first images emerged.

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After the shipment of the Covishield Vaccines from India that reached Brazil, the health workers in Rio De Janeiro were among the very first people to be given the jab of a vaccine vial that was manufactured in India.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been sued by countries indigenous leaders for crimes against humanity. Two top Brazilian indigenous leaders have asked the international criminal court to investigate President Bolsonaro for 'crime against humanity'.

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