Potentials and challenges for the operationalization of the vaccination campaign against Covid-19 in Brazil

The Unified Health System (SUS) has the National Immunization Program (NIP), coordinated by the Ministry of Health, which has been consolidating itself as one of the most relevant public health interventions in the world. Created in 1973, in its 46-year trajectory, the PNI is characterized as an efficient public policy, increasingly impacting the profile of morbidity and mortality of the Brazilian population, adapting to changes in the political, epidemiological, and social fields. Indeed, the NIP has extensive experience in organizing mass vaccination campaigns, achieving high vaccine coverage and its objective, which is to protect the health of the population defined in these strategies. However, the lack of central coordination on the part of the federal government has led some states to seek their own initiatives decentralizing the vaccination against COVID-19. In 2020, the Ministry of Health of Brazil rejected the aforementioned proposal to sell the 70 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. In Brazil, vaccination began at the end of January. On June 4, 2021, we had 74.8 million doses of vaccines administered to the Brazilian population, 23.3 million of which were fully vaccinated (with both doses), which corresponds to 11.1% of the Brazilian population. Brazil has a structure to succeed in the vaccination campaign against Covid-19 and has a universal health system - SUS, what is missing is to depoliticize the issue of the vaccine against Covid-19 and focus on what should be the focus since the beginning of the epidemic in Brazil: saving lives!