The first shipment of 88 liters of active ingredients to make AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine in Brazil has arrived from China, an essential input to speed the country’s troubled vaccination programme.

With those supplies flown into Rio de Janeiro on a cargo plane, the Fiocruz biomedical centre can begin filling and finishing 2.8 million doses. The federally funded center expects to receive more ingredients this month to make a total of 15m shots of the vaccine developed with Oxford University.

The AstraZeneca Plc vaccine is the central pillar of Brazil’s national inoculation program and the federal government has ordered material for Fiocruz to make up to 100m shots, according to a Reuters report.

To start inoculating its 210m people, Brazil has relied initially on the Chinese vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd and two million ready-to-use AstraZeneca shots imported from India last month.