A Brazilian city becomes a world laboratory for immunization against the coronavirus
Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic in the world, vaccinated this Sunday against covid most of the adults in a city of 150,000 inhabitants as part of an unprecedented study that can provide world references on the effectiveness of mass immunization.
The project, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), turned Botucatu, a medium-sized city in the interior of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, into a global laboratory for a “real life study” of covid immunization.
Those responsible for the project set themselves the goal of vaccinating this Sunday some 80,000 people between the ages of 18 and 60, which correspond to just over 80% of the 106,000 adults in Botucatu, a city located 237 kilometers from Sao Paulo, the largest Brazilian city, and which has the headquarters of important universities.
As those over 60 years of age had already been vaccinated during the national immunization campaign that began on January 18, the expectation is that at least 90% of all adults in the city will be immunized by the end of this Sunday.
Study of the Ministry of Health
The campaign is part of a study promoted by the Ministry of Health and the Paulista State University (Unesp) to study the efficacy of mass immunization with the vaccine developed jointly by the AstraZeneca laboratory and the University of Oxford, which also joined the experiment .
The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, linked to the Ministry of Health, the largest medical research center in Latin America and which has the license to manufacture 210 million doses of the Oxford vaccine in Brazil, is also promoting the experiment.
In this phase four study, in addition to verifying the ability of the Oxford vaccine to reduce cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from covid-19, it is intended to analyze the efficacy of mass vaccination and that of the immunizer against the new variants of the circulating coronavirus in Brazil.
The experiment lasts eight months and includes the application of the two doses of the vaccine -with an interval of three months- and the monitoring of the health status of all those who were immunized, as well as that of the inhabitants of neighboring cities. , which will be used as a basis for a comparison.
genetic sequences
Those responsible for the study will carry out genetic sequences of the samples of all Botucatu residents who contract the virus after being immunized to identify the variants that continue to cause covid cases and try to identify genetic or behavioral characteristics that may affect the prevalence of infections.
The study can help define strategies to follow after vaccination against covid in Brazil, the second country in the world in number of deaths from the disease, with about 435,000 victims, and the third in number of infections, with about 15, 6 million cases.
Brazil, with 84 million vaccines already distributed throughout the country from the AstraZeneca, Sinovac and Pfizer laboratories, has already applied the first dose of the immunizers to about 19% of its population and the two doses to almost 10%.
According to the epidemiologist Cargos Magno Fortaleza, a Unesp researcher and one of the study coordinators, this is the first time that a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants has been subjected to such an experiment in the world.
“Actual Dimension”
The researcher stated that Botucatu was chosen precisely because of its size so that the study results can give a “real dimension” of how a vaccine can impact the reduction in the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths from covid, and should serve as a reference for other countries.
“All new cases that are notified and confirmed by the laboratory will be monitored and all the viruses responsible for these infections will be sequenced in order to identify the variants that continue to circulate and the most resistant ones,” added Fortaleza.
The results of the mass immunization of the adult population in Botucatu will be compared both with those of neighboring cities where vaccination is carried out gradually and with those of Brazil in general and with those of the underage population in the study municipality itself. .
The campaign this Sunday was opened by the Brazilian Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, and took advantage of both the public health posts and the traditional polling places, since the electoral authority has the complete list of adults and the ability to summon them.
The experiment is similar to one launched a few weeks ago in Serrana, another city in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, although smaller, but with the difference that the vaccine developed by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac and the adult population were used in that municipality. she was immunized in a campaign that lasted almost a month.