Jair Bolsonaro criticised Brazil's health regulator Anvisa for proposing the vaccination passport be required for arriving travellers to help prevent the spread of new coronavirus variants.

"Anvisa wants to close the country's airspace now. Not again, damn it," Bolsonaro, a prominent vaccine sceptic, said at a business event in Brasilia.

Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga, speaking after a Cabinet meeting later on Tuesday, said Brazil would not adopt the passport and discriminate against people who are not vaccinated.

He said, however, Brazil will require unvaccinated people entering the country to quarantine and have a COVID-19 test.

Anvisa last month proposed adopting a vaccination passport for entry into Brazil. Bolsonaro has repeatedly attacked the proposal.

Vaccine scepticism from the president, who says he has not received a COVID-19 jab, has done little to dampen Brazilians' eagerness to get immunised, with more than 85 per cent of adults now fully vaccinated.

The Supreme Court on Monday gave 48 hours for the executive branch to explain why the vaccination passport had not yet been adopted.

Last week, at the suggestion of Anvisa, the government suspended flights from six countries in southern Africa, where the new, fast-spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus was identified.

Bolsonaro repeated his criticism of COVID-19 vaccines on Tuesday, saying vaccinated people can still be infected, spread the coronavirus and die from COVID-19.

He also minimised the threat from the new variant, saying there are "thousands of viruses" and the pandemic was ending.

While much is still not known about Omicron, unvaccinated people account for the vast majority of severe COVID-19 cases and deaths.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University in the US, more than 616,000 people have died in Brazil with COVID-19, the second-highest tally in the world.

Australian Associated Press