What happened to the Covid vaccines Brazil promised to develop?

Some Covid vaccines have gone out of fashion. At the request of Janssen, for example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week withdrew approval for its vaccine, the last lots of which have now expired. Only the new, bivalent versions of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines remain in use in the U.S.

Other vaccines, however, have not yet made it into people’s arms. 

That is the case with candidate vaccines that began development or testing in Brazil earlier in the pandemic but are not yet available for mass immunization campaigns. The World Health Organization declared the end of the global health emergency in early May, but that does not mean the pandemic is over.

At the height of the pandemic, several vaccine candidates were announced — some with strong political overtones. In March 2021, the then governor of São Paulo, João Doria, announced ButanVac, a supposedly “100 percent Brazilian” vaccine. The move would help Brazil reduce its dependence on pharmaceutical ingredients imported from China and India. 

At the time, Mr. Doria was a presidential hopeful, although his plan was scuttled by leaders within his own party.

ButanVac was actually developed using technology imported from U.S.-based researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York and the University of Texas at Austin. This omission by Mr. Doria was later treated by spin doctors as something...