Iran and Cuba announce start of joint production of anti-Covid vaccine

HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 28 (ACN) Millions of doses of a vaccine against Covid-19 will be produced by Iran and Cuba starting next week, according to Dr. Vicente Vérez Bencomo, general director of the Finlay Vaccine Institute, in an interview given to a Persian media outlet.

Prensa Latina news agency reported the interview given by the scientist to the Hispantv channel, in which he announced that both countries are using all the knowledge and platforms within their reach to produce PastuCovac, which would be the first conjugated vaccine in the world against COVID-19.

Vérez Bencomo and Dr. Alireza Biglarí, top executive of the Pasteur Institute of Iran, held a press conference this Tuesday in Tehran in which they gave details of the scientific and technological collaboration, and which followed other activities of the Cuban researcher in that country that included a meeting with Foreign Minister Mohamad Yavad Zarif and another one with Dr. Said Namaki, Minister of Health.

The Finlay Institute has a lot of experience in the production of conjugate vaccines for children, so we decided to use this platform to build a vaccine against COVID-19, Vérez Bencomo explained.

This does not mean that other countries do not have this capability," he said, "but Iran and Cuba were the first countries to develop a conjugate vaccine against COVID-19 about a year ago, which is in the final stages of the third phase of a clinical trial.

This co-production, called Soberana 02 or PastuCovac, meets all its expectations, including prevention of infections and production of antibodies in the cell, and is effective against mutations of the virus, he said.

"It takes 15 years to develop a vaccine from zero to the industrialization stage, but we did all the steps in one year, and the evidence shows that it works very well," he stressed.

In this regard, he stated that they are currently in the industrial stage and are expected to start producing millions of doses of the vaccine next week.

There was already a long-standing collaboration between the two institutes in the production of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and the transfer of this technology to Iran, so the scientist stressed that thanks to this previous cooperation, both countries were able to make rapid progress in order to work on the manufacture of the new vial.

This anti-pneumococcal antigen, recalled Vérez Bencomo, was the best-selling and most expensive vaccine in history in 2002, and the peoples of Iran and Cuba did not have access to it due to the sanctions against them, because it was a vaccine manufactured in the U.S., a fact that led the Cubans to obtain sovereignty and develop it for 15 years.

After manufacturing one of their own, through scientific-technical collaboration between both States, they transferred their technology to their Iranian counterparts. This experience has been very useful in the case of anti-Covid-19 drugs.

Prensa Latina points out that the U.S. blockade policy against Tehran and Havana hinders the acquisition of equipment and medicines, which is why the scientists of the two countries used their knowledge to circumvent this inhumane siege.

Beforehand, the Pasteur Institute released a communiqué stating that "Cuba and Iran have to their credit a long history of cooperation in the field of biotechnology", and pointed out that the understanding on the vaccine against Covid-19 is based "on a strategic relationship in the field of research and development of vaccination technologies".