The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tredros Adhanom, affirmed that his institution supports Cuba’s policies to face the coronavirus pandemic through the development of its own vaccines.
Through his Twitter account, the head of the WHO thanked the island’s permanent representative in Geneva, Juan Antonio Quintanilla, and pointed out that the international entity supports Cuba’s struggle against COVID-19, “even investing in the capacity of locally manufacturing of vaccines and prioritizing public health measures to contain the transmission” of the virus.
https://twitter.com/drtedros/status/1430519532754509827?s=21
Adhanom and Quintanilla met this Wednesday morning to exchange about the island’s work in the battle against COVID-19, reported the Agencia Cubana de Noticias news agency.
Cuba became the first Latin American country to have its own COVID-19 vaccine and there are currently three drugs against the disease approved by the local regulatory authority — Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus — whose immunization schemes showed promising results in their respective clinical trials.
At the same time, the island’s pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry is developing other vaccine candidates and various drugs to treat patients with the contagious disease.
In addition, Cuba has cooperated in confronting the pandemic at the international level by sending dozens of medical brigades to countries hard hit by the disease.
In the midst of an economic and financial crisis exacerbated by COVID-19 and the United States embargo, the highest Cuban authorities renounced the participation in the COVAX mechanism that helps disadvantaged countries with vaccines and bet on technological sovereignty in the confrontation of the virus.
Cuban Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal has stressed that the national biotechnology industry produces 85% of the supplies and medicines used in the treatment protocol for those infected, the agency indicated.
In the most recent update on the vaccination process against COVID-19, the Ministry of Public Health specified that 12,852,801 doses of vaccines against the disease have already been administered on the island.
Although several countries have shown interest in Cuban vaccines, so far the island’s biotechnology industry has only announced agreements with Venezuela and Iran, either for the supply of the drugs or for their joint production, in the case of the Persian country.
Likewise, the Vietnamese authorities reported this Tuesday that Cuba has agreed to send a large number of COVID-19 vaccines to the Asian country this year, to transfer technology and send specialized personnel to produce in Vietnam.
In an article on its website, the Vietnamese government pointed out that the offer stems from a telephone conversation the day before between Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
