Coronavirus crisis has made Brazil an ideal vaccine laboratory

With sustained widespread contagion, a deep bench of immunization experts, a robust medical manufacturing infrastructure and thousands of vaccine trial volunteers, Brazil has emerged as a potentially vital player in the global scramble to end the pandemic.

Three of the most promising and advanced vaccine studies in the world are relying on scientists and volunteers in Brazil, according to the World Health Organization’s report on the progress of vaccine research.

The embattled government hopes its citizens could be among the first in the world to be inoculated. And medical experts are imagining the possibility that Brazil could even manufacture the vaccine and export it to neighboring countries, a prospect that fills them with something that has been in short supply this year: pride.

“I’m very optimistic,” said Dimas Covas, the director of the Butantan Institute, an internationally renowned biopharmaceutical producer that is partnering with China’s Sinovac on one of the studies that has reached the third stage of research, during which potential vaccines are tested on 9,000 people.