Cuba has the capacity to produce enough vaccines

HAVANA, Cuba, Feb 5 (ACN) Cuba has the capacity to produce different quantities of vaccines to begin the campaign for immunizing its entire population, said Eduardo Martinez Diaz, president of the Biotechnological and Pharmaceutical Industries Group (BioCubaFarma).

Speaking on the radio program Mesa Redonda, he stated that the four vaccine candidates are doing well, although it is not possible to say that they are effective until the planned studies are completed.

The expert stressed that the Cuban drugs use technological platforms already shown to be safe and effective in previous vaccines.

Martinez Diaz emphasized that a variant can be dedicated to different population groups, as is the case of convalescents, and different doses are also evaluated depending on age.

Another of the potentialities of these vaccines lies in the fact that they require a freezing temperature of only 2 to 8 degrees, and in the face of the appearance of new variants of the coronavirus, they can include successive booster doses, he underlined.

Likewise, the president of BioCubaFarma expressed that only 108 million doses of vaccines have been applied in the world, a little more than one percent of the population, and they have been concentrated in only 13 countries; therefore, there is not enough quantity at the moment.

Prices vary between 10 and 35 dollars a dose and should be lowered so that the poorest countries have access, he insisted.

At the beginning we had designed more candidates and, as information was obtained, we focused on those in human clinical trials, the scientist commented.

He explained that the four candidates use the same Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) antigen and at the start of the studies demonstrated immune response and the capacity to inhibit the entry of the virus.