TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran’s campaign to inoculate its population against coronavirus and promote itself as an emerging vaccine maker was boosted as health authorities announced Tuesday that the country’s third indigenous vaccine has arrived. in the clinical trials phase.
Details about its production, however, remained scarce.
Although Iran, with a population of more than 80 million, has so far imported foreign vaccines from Russia, China, India and Cuba to cover more than 1.2 million people, concerns about its pace Delayed vaccinations have encouraged Iran’s willingness to develop locally produced vaccines as the richest nations recover most of the vaccine doses worldwide.
Iranian scientists, like anywhere else in the world, are rushing to condense the typical process of years to develop vaccines in a few months, a task that has taken on urgency as the country struggles to curb the worst virus outbreak. in the Middle East and its economy severe US sanctions.
But details are scarce about the Islamic Republic’s vaccine production efforts. Two other Iranian vaccines are also in the clinical trial phase, with the most advanced, called Barekat, tested so far with 300 people.
The government said 20,000 volunteers in the capital Tehran and other cities will soon receive Iran’s new vaccine, called Fakhra, which an official described to the state media as “100% safe”, without providing any evidence or data. to support the claim. Earlier this week, the government launched a vaccine production plant that claims it can make 3 million doses a day.
The vaccine introduced on state television on Tuesday was created by an affiliate of the Ministry of Defense of Iran, known as the Research and Innovation Organization.
As with the Barekat vaccine still in the early stages of clinical trials, the company used inactivated coronaviruses from 35,000 samples to make the new vaccine, a traditional technology based on growing batches of viruses and then killing it. In comparison, Western drug manufacturers are adopting a new gene-based approach to targeting the peaks of the outer structure of the coronavirus, a method that had never been approved for widespread use.
Iran’s fragmented approach to domestic vaccine production, with entities ranging from state-owned pharmaceutical conglomerates to the Ministry of Defense working separately on at least six different vaccines, reflects the country’s biggest factional rivalries and structures. power competitors.
At a ceremony attended by senior officials in Tehran on Tuesday, Iranian state television aired images of a single volunteer receiving the Fakhra vaccine, named after Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who died in an attack. November that Iran blamed Israel..
Although Fakhrizadeh was known to lead the country’s disbanded nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s, Iran has praised him as the leader of the national coronavirus vaccine development campaign. Fakhrizadeh’s son was the first to receive the sting of the new vaccine.
The coronavirus has infected more than 1.7 million people in Iran and killed 61,427, according to health ministry data released Tuesday, the highest number of deaths in the Middle East.
Iran formally launched its limited vaccination campaign last month, eliminating Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine to health workers and those with chronic diseases. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has banned imports from Iran American and British vaccines, a reflection of his deep distrust of the West.
However, Iran later said it would receive 4.2 million doses of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and UK-based drug maker AstraZeneca through the global COVAX initiative, created by ensure that low- and middle-income countries have fair access to vaccines.
The Ministry of Health has promised to vaccinate all adults in the country by the end of September, although it is still uncertain how the government will achieve this ambitious goal. Iran says it expects to import doses for more than 16 million people of COVAX.
The government has alleged that harsh US sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump in 2018 undermined efforts to buy foreign-made vaccines and deploy mass inoculation campaigns such as those being advanced in the United States and Europe. . While international banks and financial institutions often hesitate to deal with Iranian transactions for fear of being fined or shut down in the U.S. market, U.S. sanctions have specific cuts for drugs and humanitarian aid in Iran.
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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE, contributed to this report.