Abstract
Brazil is among the countries which have faced two devastating infection waves of COVID-19 in the past year. Despite the fact the country has one of the world's leading immunization programs, Brazil only slowly established a national COVID-19 vaccination strategy and campaign. This case study is based on an integrative review of primary and secondary literature sources. Different search strategies on Medline and Google Scholar were performed for the case presentation, for the management and outcome of the COVID-19 outbreak and for the state of the COVID-19 vaccination program. Official documents from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, the website of the World Health Organization and pharmaceutical companies were also reviewed. Searches were limited to English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. This article describes the Brazilian COVID-19 vaccination campaign and the drivers and barriers to its implementation; and evaluates further investigations needed to have a conclusive overview over the constantly evolving situation. Healthcare inequalities, which were widened during the pandemic, a lack of coordination at the federal level, the absence of federal government support for scientific research and the lack of endorsement and commitment to the mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic set the country's COVID-19 vaccination campaign off to a challenging start. However, Brazil had a well-developed primary care system and national vaccination program prior to the pandemic, which are both important facilitators. At the time of writing, six vaccines are currently available in the country, and the program is advancing. The scientific community needs to continue to investigate the country's vaccination strategy and its implementation to make sure that maximum effort is undertaken for the health of the Brazilian population.
Highlights
With the emergence of the novel SARS-Cov-2-virus and its rapid spread across the world, the race for a safe and efficient vaccine began
The epidemiological situation of COVID-19 in Brazil has not affected the whole population in an equal way
When the first case of COVID-19 was detected in Brazil at the end of February 2020, the federal government’s initial reaction was to quarantine only the detected cases
Summary
With the emergence of the novel SARS-Cov-2-virus (causing COVID-19) and its rapid spread across the world, the race for a safe and efficient vaccine began. With a naive population (with no immunity), lack of effective pharmaceutical interventions and the inconsequential application of non-pharmaceutical interventions, the number of cases and deaths in Brazil increased rapidly [2]. Epidemiologia 2021, 2 systems [3] This highlighted the fact that the most effective epidemiological intervention remained the development of a safe and effective vaccine, which could be produced fast and distributed quickly to a large part of the population [4,5]. As soon as the genetic sequencing of the SARS-Cov-2-virus was published on 11 January 2020, different actors started engaging in a large effort towards the research and development of a COVID-19 vaccine [6]
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