The Cuban pharmaceutical group will file a file with WHO to recognize two VVID-19 vaccines and enable them international marketing.
Le Monde with AFP
Cuba is preparing to play in the great yard. The Havana will ask the World Health Organization in the World Organization (WHO) of two of its Vaccines against COVID-19, Abdala and Soberana 02, to enable international recognition, said the director of the State group Biocubafarma.
“We plan to send the file to WHO in the first few weeks of March,” said Eduardo Martinez, whose group has created and manufactures Abdala. Cuba has developed in all three vaccines against Cvid-19, used on the island but also in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Iran. These vaccines are based on a recombinant protein, the same technique used by American companies Novavax and French Sanofi.
Biocubafarma has informed WHO have developed a new industrial complex in Mariel, 50 kilometers west of Havana, to make its vaccines on an industrial scale as required by the organization. “They told us to send the file and that they would make the inspection to give us prequalification once the complex would be operational,” Martinez said.
financing problems
“We believe that [Cuban vaccines] will be recognized without any problem. We have experience and we have already had other vaccines [against other diseases] who have gone through this prequalification process,” he added. Cuban vaccines “have proven that they are safe,” with 88% of the immune population and the epidemic under control locally.
Under the United States embargo since 1962, Cuba has been developing its own vaccines since the 1980s. It is the first Latin American country to have developed against CVIV-19. The country of 11.2 million inhabitants recorded a total of 1,062,154 cases including 8,746 deaths. Tuesday, he announced only 630 cases in the last 24 hours and no deaths.
m. Martinez indicated that the first trials at the Mariel complex have respected “the required” quality parameters “but indicated that the company faces funding issues. “We managed to export vaccines and drugs at the end of the last year and we have trouble being paid to the refusal of the banks to work with us”, because of the American embargo, which delayed the rules of raw materials necessary for the Cuban pharmaceutical industry.
Only ten VVID-19 vaccines are formally approved for urgency purposes by WHO, in addition to about twenty authorized formulations locally in several countries.