Pfizer enlists entire town in Brazil for COVID study
pharmafile | October 7, 2021 | News story | Research and Development |
An entire town in Brazil has been enrolled by Pfizer to study the transmission of the coronavirus within a vaccinated population.
The study will be carried out among those over the age of 12 in the town of Toledo, west of the country’s Parana state.
In a release, Pfizer said: “The initiative is the first and only of its kind to be undertaken in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company in a developing country.”
The observational study will help researchers gain a better understanding of the “real-life scenario” of COVID-19 transmission, once an entire population is vaccinated.
The study will therefore aim to validate the real-world efficacy and safety of the Pfizer vaccine seen in clinical trials, Regis Goulart, a researcher at Porto Alegre’s Moinhos de Vento hospital, told Reuters.
Participants will be monitored for a year and will help answer questions such as the emergence of new variants and how long vaccines will prove to protect against COVID-19.
Beto Lunitti, the town’s mayor, said at a press conference announcing the Pfizer study: “Here we believe in science and we lament the almost 600,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil.”
The population of the town is 143,000, with at least 98% of its population having already received a first dose of a vaccine, primarily Pfizer. Around 56% of the town is also fully vaccinated, with AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines also being used, said municipal health secretary Gabriela Kucharski.
The study will be run in partnership with Brazil’s national vaccination programme, local health authorities, a federal university, and the Moinhos de Vento hospital.
A similar study has already been conducted in the smaller town of Serrana in Sao Paulo state, and tested the CoronaVac jab, developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech.
Butantan Institute, a leading biomedical research centre in Brazil which conducted the study, said in May that mass vaccination reduced COVID-19 deaths by 95% in the town, which has a population of 45,644 people.
Kat Jenkins
