Before the coronavirus pandemic, Brazil was a worldwide reference in vaccination, with infrastructure to inoculate up to 1 million people a day. However, due to logistics hiccups and a lack of supplies, the push to immunize Brazilians against Covid-19 has been much slower — at an average pace of just 179,000 jabs a day. But within this underwhelming scenario, Brazil’s richest and most populous state São Paulo has been a positive outlier, administering almost nine vaccines for every 100 inhabitants.
Data collected by The Brazilian Report shows that, if São Paulo were its own country, it would only trail Chile in vaccines distributed per 100 people in Latin America — but the state has a population 2.4 times the size of Chile’s.
For a fairer comparison, São Paulo’s 45 million inhabitants puts its population on par with Argentina’s.
The neighboring country began rollouts on December 29 last year, using the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine. However, after 11 weeks, Argentina has only distributed 5.85 doses per 100 people. Most went to the province of Buenos Aires, but even there the vaccination rate goes no further than six jabs per 100 people.
Being home to almost one-fifth of the entire Brazilian population, it is no surprise that São Paulo has received more vaccines in absolute terms. Over 29 percent of the 14.1 million vaccines administered in the country have gone to the state, and the local immunization total is set to...
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