Coronavirus: Brazil senators say anti-China views hurt country’s access to Covid-19 vaccines

In parliamentary inquiry into president’s handling of coronavirus, senators blamed Bolsonaro and his inner circle for vaccine ingredient delays

The pandemic has claimed over 435,000 lives in Brazil but just one in eight adults have been fully vaccinated

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A surge of Covid-19 cases this year has raised Brazil’s death toll to more than 435,000, and the country is short of vaccines. Some 85 per cent of the vaccines administered in Brazil were from China’s Sinovac. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:14pm, 19 May 2021Updated: 10:57pm, 19 May 2021

Brazilian senators on Tuesday accused the country’s former foreign minister of undermining efforts to obtain Covid-19 vaccines after he used anti-China rhetoric during the pandemic.

In a parliamentary inquiry into far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the world’s second-deadliest outbreak of the novel coronavirus, senators blamed the president and his inner circle for delays in deliveries from China of active ingredients to make Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine in Brazil.

Ernesto Araujo, who was replaced as foreign minister in March, told senators on Tuesday (Brazil time) that Bolsonaro’s disparagement of the Chinese vaccine did not affect relations with Brazil’s largest trade partner or delay vaccine supplies.

Araujo last year published an article entitled “The Comunavirus Has Arrived” where he argued that the novel coronavirus was part of a plan for global domination.

In the hearing, he denied the article disparaged China.

“It was not a reference to coronavirus but to an ideological virus, coined by another author, that creates the conditions for a global communist society,” he told the Senate commission.

Senator Katia Abreu, a farmer and former agriculture minister, said Araujo’s views and those of the Bolsonaro government had hurt exports to China, where the approval of dozens of Brazilian meatpacking plants had been held up in Beijing.

Coronavirus: Brazil senators say anti-China views hurt country’s access to Covid-19 vaccines

In parliamentary inquiry into president’s handling of coronavirus, senators blamed Bolsonaro and his inner circle for vaccine ingredient delays The pandemic has claimed over 435,000 lives in Brazil but just one in eight adults have been fully vaccinated

In parliamentary inquiry into president’s handling of coronavirus, senators blamed Bolsonaro and his inner circle for vaccine ingredient delays

The pandemic has claimed over 435,000 lives in Brazil but just one in eight adults have been fully vaccinated