Brazil approves Pfizer Covid vaccine for widespread use

Brazil's health regulatory agency said Tuesday it had approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for widespread use, as the country races to secure enough doses to contain one of the world's worst outbreaks.

"It gives me great pleasure to announce that after a 17-day review, (regulators) have granted the first approval in the Americas for widespread use of a vaccine against Covid-19," said Antonio Barra Torres, the director of federal health regulator Anvisa, underlining that the approval was definitive and not only for emergency use.

However, the vaccine is not yet available in Brazil, which is so far using two others: Chinese-developed CoronaVac and one developed by Oxford University and British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca.