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NEW DELHI: India and China are — quite unwittingly — on opposing sides of a heated political debate in Brazil, a battle royal between Covishield by the Serum Institute and Coronavac by China’s Sinovac.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who does not have a healthy fear of Covid, did not focus too much on securing vaccines for his people, even though Brazil is, like India, one of the world’s top vaccine-producing countries.
However, things became serious when the governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria, Bolsonaro’s political opponent and a potential contender for the presidency in 2022 declared in December 2020, that he would vaccinate 44 million residents of his province with the Coronavac, developed by China’s Sinovac.