Countries like India, Pakistan, Iran, Vietnam and neighboring Venezuela are already interested in importing the Sovereign-2 vaccine developed in Cuba against COVID-19, the Finlay Institute said, although the sting is still there. is in the clinical trial phase.
Cuba’s Finlay Institute is preparing to produce 100 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccines this year, citing demand from other developing and national countries.
“We are reorganizing our production capacities because we really have a lot of demand for the vaccine and we have to prepare,” Vicente Vérez, director of the institute, told reporters on Wednesday during a visit to the laboratory.
Vérez said other countries interested in the Sovereign 02 vaccine include South American ally Venezuela, Vietnam, Iran, India and Pakistan.
The Finlay Vaccines Institute has two vaccine candidates in development, Sovereign (“Sovereign”) 01 and Sovereign 02. The latter is more advanced and is currently in phase II trials, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Other Cuban biotechnology laboratories are working on two more vaccines, Abdala and Mambisa.
Several Phase III vaccines have been approved for “emergency” use and are being administered as part of mass vaccination programs, including those developed by Germany’s Pfizer BioNTech, Modern American and British AstraZeneca.
Cuba, with a population of about 11.5 million, would only need a fraction of the 100 million for its domestic needs.
The second stage of the Phase II trials of Sovereign 02 began this week at a polyclinic, a state medical center, in the capital of Havana, with about 900 test subjects. About 100 people took part in the previous stage.
But Vérez added that 150,000 people across the island would be vaccinated in the coming weeks, while trials of Sovereign 02 in children would begin next month.
Volunteers did not report any side effects after getting the sting, in contrast to numerous reports of serious adverse reactions to the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine around the world. Vérez stressed that Sovereign-2 does not contain a living virus like many other vaccines, but antigenic proteins from dead viral particles.
“Cuba’s strategy of marketing the vaccine has a combination of humanity and impact on the health and need of our system to maintain the production of vaccines and medicines for the country,” Vérez said.
“We are not a multinational where return is the first reason,” he added. “We work the other way around; creating more health and return is a consequence; it will never be the priority.”
With many nations competing to produce a coronavirus vaccine and end the pandemic and national drug regulators acting as porters, a situation of parallel markets is developing. West-west and west-aligned states are placing orders for Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca funnels, while many developing countries, including Venezuela and Argentina, are buying the Sputnik-V vaccine at the Gamaleya Institute in Russia or Sinovac product from the Chinese firm Sinopharm.
These markets overlap in some places. Brazil is important Sputnik-V and Sinovac, as well as Pfizer and AstraZeneca. South Africa’s health ministry says it is talking to Gamaleya and Sinopharm, but so far it has only placed orders from European manufacturers. Brazil imports vaccines from several nations, although President Jair Bolsonaro has criticized a clause in the Pfizer contract that absolves him of responsibility for the harm suffered by patients.
While Sputnik-V and Sinovac have not yet been considered by Western regulators, the French newspaper The world reported that political pressure was put on the European Medicines Agency to accelerate the Pfizer vaccine in the EU. Since the UK’s approval of the easier-to-store AstraZeneca vaccine, in addition to the Pfizer puncture, the British National Health Service has inoculated almost four times as many people as Germany and almost six times as many as France.
Cuba has recorded 19,122 Covid-19 infections and 180 deaths since the pandemic hit the island last March.