In November it became known that the Government had agreed with this firm the purchase of 2 million doses of the drug, the sum has not been detailed
The National Medicines Directorate (DNM) today authorized the import, distribution and use of the Covid-19 vaccine from the company AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
According to the statement issued by the DNM, it is a “special emergency authorization” and was granted today during an extraordinary session.
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In addition, the regulatory institution justifies that the permit granted to the drug is technically and legally based on the evidence generated by the manufacturer and by the health authorities of other countries that have previously issued emergency authorizations for this product.
The most recent official figures account for 45,960 confirmed cases of patients with Covid-19; 1,327 deaths are also mentioned.
By the end of November, it became known that the government had agreed to purchase 2 million doses of the covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
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So far, the government has not made public the sums involved in buying any of these vaccines, and has only announced that their application in the country will not have an extra cost to the population, and everyone will be able to decide whether to accept or not the injection.
The doubts of the specialists
The company AstraZeneca still has to do additional studies to check the operation and effectiveness of its vaccine against COVID-19, so it seems “impossible that we will have it in El Salvador in the first quarter of the year” , explained this Wednesday the infectologist Iván Solano Leiva, in an interview with Canal 33.
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Applying AstraZeneca in the first quarter of 2021 was an announcement made by the President of the Republic, Nayib Bukele, last November, although the president explained that this agreement was subject to the company completing clinical trials in thousands of patients.
Specialist Solano Leiva confirmed that, as a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (CAPI) working with the Ministry of Health, he is aware that last Wednesday the technical approval was given to the Salvadoran government so that it can apply the Pfizer BionTech vaccine to the country, as Dr. Milton Brizuela, president of the Medical College, had advanced in today’s newspaper.
The situation of delay that AstraZeneca is going through has led the Government to negotiate with BionTech Pfizer, said Solano Leiva, adding that “this is more likely that we can have it in the first quarter of 2021”, as expected l ‘Executive but with the British-Swedish medication with which he had already negotiated.
