Cuba expects to complete all the coronavirus vaccines it needs in August

Cuba expects to count “at the latest” in August with the million doses of the vaccine against coronavirus that it needs to immunize “its entire” population, and then it will continue to manufacture them to help “friendly countries”, the scientist in charge announced this Wednesday.

“At the latest, in the month of August, we will have manufactured the doses required to immunize our entire population (11.2 million inhabitants), and then we will continue to produce them, in order to supply them to other friendly countries”said the president of the state group BioCubaFarma, Eduardo Martínez, quoted by the official newspaper Granma.

Martínez stressed that the island also collaborates “With a group of nations (…) in order to assess the possibility of conducting clinical studies of” your vaccine candidates against COVID-19, “Establish productive alliances and seek universal vaccines against coronaviruses”.

In the past week, Cuba shipment to Iran 100,000 doses of Sovereign 2, its most advanced anticovid vaccine project, to test the efficacy of the antigen, and the country also had contacts with Mexico and Vietnam on the matter.

Scientific authorities on the island have said that Cuba has the capacity to manufacture in 2021 about 100 million doses of Sovereign 2 and that the vaccination campaign will begin in the first semester.

Sovereign 2 became on March 4 the first experimental vaccine against the COVID-19 Latin America to enter phase three, the last before approval. The clinical trials are carried out in Havana with the participation of 44,000 volunteers between the ages of 19 and 80.

Of that total, the first 4,478 already received the antigen in the past week, and “only mild adverse events have occurred in some subjects, such as injection site pain” and “general malaise,” Granma said Tuesday.

All Cuban experimental vaccines against COVID-19 they are recombinant protein. In addition to Soberana 2, local scientists work on Abdala (waiting for the green light to go to phase three), Soberana 1 (in phase 2) and Mambisa (in phase 1).

The island’s experts are also working on a fifth candidate, Sovereign +, based on a reformulation of Sovereign 1 and destined for convalescents from the disease.

Although it is currently facing an outbreak of cases, Cuba It keeps the pandemic under control with 63,725 cases and 380 deaths, figures lower than those shown by its neighbors in the region.