Another flight to Russia looking for a new batch …

Another Aerolineas Argentinas plane will leave for Moscow this Sunday to bring 600,000 new doses of Sputnik V vaccine. This is the third shipment to arrive in the country, this time doubling the load from previous trips. The flight would return to Ezeiza on Monday.

The Airbus 330-200, which will perform flight AR1602, will depart from Ezeiza “Ministro Pistarini” international airport bound for Moscow’s Sheremetyevo terminal. As happened during the previous two flights, the plane will land in the capital of the Russian Federation, load the vaccines and start the return trip to Argentina: then the logistics operation will start distributing the doses to all provinces.

Previously, Aerolineas Argentinas sent the first 300,000 doses of the Russian vaccine to the country on December 24 last year. The second flight, completed a week ago, entered the country an additional 300,000 units corresponding to the second dose component for people who had already been vaccinated, thus completing the planned schedule.

On this occasion, ten crew members will make the trip, which will be extended by nearly 16 hours of flight. For its part, the number of doses “will depend on the volume of vaccine containers,” said sources consulted by the Telam agency.

The specialists specify that the transfer of vaccines from the Gamaleya Institute to Argentina can be done in three different ways: with the Thermobox (innovative packaging kept in the refrigerator throughout the supply chain), as was done during the first two trips, in boxes or in refrigerated containers.

With the Thermobox, up to 600,000 vaccines can be captured per flight, while boxes require more volume, and therefore less quantity to load. Refrigerated containers, on the other hand, take up less volume and, on the other hand, carry more. Therefore, the quantity of vaccine transported will not be known until private international courier companies have confirmed the packaging methods ultimately chosen.

It is important to remember that the Russian authorities last Thursday approved the storage of Sputnik V at the temperature of a normal refrigerator, that is to say between 2 ° C and 8 ° C. This was announced by the Minister of Health of the Russian Federation in a meeting with experts.

In turn, the national government has signed a contract with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (FRID) which provides for the supply to Argentina of four million from the first dose plus one million from the second dose with an arrival date before the end of January. . In addition, the agreement guarantees the delivery to the country of 14.7 million additional vaccines for February. The executive also has an agreement with the AstraZeneca laboratory, which develops the vaccine at the University of Oxford, for the supply of 22 million doses. And nine million doses have been secured by Covax, a global mechanism for purchasing vaccines from the World Health Organization (WHO).

With the new batch of Sputnik V vaccines that will arrive on Monday, the areas that will start with the vaccination program will be expanded and progress will be made with the application of doses to teachers – in the province of Buenos Aires, it is expected that to start the next week-, security forces personnel and over 60 years – of the approval of ANMAT and the results of the Gamaleya Institute which found an efficiency of 98.1%.