This Sunday the vaccination process against COVID-19 began in the Cuban province of Cienfuegos. The fact would not be a novelty in Cuba — which already has three of its own immunogens approved by the island’s regulatory authority — were it not for a detail: Cienfuegos will be immunized with a scheme that contains a Chinese vaccine.
The news that the island would use the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine has raised many questions. What is its cause? Why use a foreign vaccine whose efficacy is lower than that shown in clinical trials by those created on the island? Why use it now and not before?
These questions arise, in part, from the statements of authorities and specialists disclosed so far in the official Cuban media, according to which the island would become the first country in the world to immunize its entire population with its own vaccines and promised to produce 100 million doses to achieve it. The official propaganda even recycled the slogan of the failed 1970 sugar harvest, the so-called “10-million-ton harvest,” which at the time generated criticism and controversy.
Nothing indicated that there would be a change in plans, even due to the fact that the Cuban authorities had given up participating in the COVAX mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO), which aims to bring vaccines to countries in need.
However, the truth is that a few months later and in the midst of the worst moment of the entire pandemic in the country, Cuba decided to use the Sinopharm vaccine together with a booster dose of Soberana Plus, which in practice means renouncing the repeatedly repeated purpose of immunizing its entire population only with its own drugs. This happens, moreover, when only around 30% of the population has completed the immunization scheme, a figure well below what was initially envisaged for the date.
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According to the Director of Science, Technology and Innovation of the Ministry of Public Health, Dra. Ileana Morales, as part of the plan to immunize its entire population this year, Cuba maintains the purpose of expanding and accelerating the vaccination process against COVID- 19.
Speaking to the Cienfuegos Perlavisión telecentre, the specialist explained that amid the difficult panorama that Cuba is going through, the Beijing Institute of Biological Products donated “around 250,000 doses of the vaccine,” and it was decided to apply this immunogen in the municipalities of Cienfuegos —immunization with the Cuban Abdala vaccine is already being carried out in the provincial capital — combined with a booster dose of Soberana Plus, which is currently also used as a booster for Soberana 02 and is being studied in convalescent patients.
Dr. Morales also assured that this intervention was approved by the Cuban regulatory authority, the Center for the State Control of Medicines, Equipment and Medical Devices (CECMED).
For her part, the director of Clinical Research at the Finlay Vaccine Institute (IFV), Dagmar García, pointed out that Sinopharm is a safe vaccine, which uses inactivated virus technology, and has been recommended by the WHO. Likewise, the expert explained that the drug developed in the Asian giant is currently applied in more than 85 countries, according to a report by the Agencia Cubana de Noticias (ACN) news agency.
García recently wrote on her Facebook profile that the scheme designed jointly between the Cuban Ministry of Public Health and the IFV will make it possible to maximize the efficacy and impact of the vaccine. The immunization scheme includes two doses of Sinopharm every 21 days and, after the same time interval, a third of Soberana Plus.
The expert specified that it is not a clinical trial, “rather a vaccination strategy that seeks to maximize efficacy based on the combination of vaccines, a strategy used in the world and in which IFV was a pioneer with its heterologous scheme of Soberana 02 and Plus, in January 2021,” the source indicated.
The director general of the IFV, Vicente Vérez, declared last week that the objective of this measure is to immunize the population to achieve a strong impact in the face of the COVID-19 surge, which in recent months reached a pandemic peak, with its most contagious and lethal variants in several territories, especially in Cienfuegos, a province that has one of the highest incidence and positivity rates of the virus in the country.
However, none of the experts and executives has specified so far the reasons why the vaccination coverage planned for this date with Cuban immunogens could not be met, although they have at certain times referred to difficulties with the production scaling, in particular the Soberana vaccines, in part due to the effects of the U.S. embargo.
Days before, the IFV and the Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) announced on Twitter that the essential active pharmaceutical ingredient to produce the first 10 million equivalent doses of the Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus vaccines was ready.
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OnCuba Staff
