After April 15, the first 900,000 AstraZeneca vaccines will arrive

This Sunday at 7:10 a.m., a KLM flight from Amsterdam is expected to land in Ezeiza, where the first doses of the 1.9 million vaccines that the COVAX fund will deliver to Argentina will arrive by May. Will be 218,000 doses of the vaccine jointly developed by the University of Oxford and the AstraZeneca laboratory, which was produced at a company plant in South Korea and from there traveled to Europe, where distribution is carried out.

But as this newspaper has learned, it is expected that after April 15 900,000 additional doses of AstraZeneca are coming. En este caso ya no por COVAX –el fondo del que participan varios organismos de Naciones Unidas–, sino initiando las entregas de los 22.4 million de dosis that el Gobierno argentino directly included in the compañía sueco-británica y que se produjeron in the country.

In these vaccines, local company mAbxience produces the active ingredient in Garin, which is exported to the northern hemisphere for packaging. The termination agreement is with the Mexican laboratory Liomont, but these doses come directly from an AstraZeneca factory in the United States.

In addition, in May the arrival of a batch of 3.5 million units also completed in the United States, and from there deliveries will increase in volume to maintain fluid flow up to finish 22.4 million in the spring. In June, it is estimated that around 5 million doses would arrive.

Logistical issues

Logistical details are still lacking on how the deliveries will be implemented, which will affect the entire region as AstraZeneca produces in Argentina and finishes in the North the vaccines of all the contracts it has concluded in Latin America, with the exception of the Brazil. There are 150 million doses that will be distributed throughout the region.

For some deliveries that the laboratory has made so far in other countries, a private courier has been chosen. It remains to be seen whether the doses will arrive in Argentina on Aerolineas Argentinas flights, such as the units that will be searched at this time in Moscow and Beijing from Sputnik V and Sinopharm respectively, or whether this will be done with another airline. , such as the delivery of COVAX. It is estimated that, in different plans, the 3.5 million May will all come to a close date, constituting a large delivery in unit volume.

As I posted 10 days ago BugleIn addition to a shortage of packaging supplies in Mexico, there were regulatory delays in that country that delayed Liomont’s start of the packaging process at its Mexican plant.

This could jeopardize AstraZeneca’s delivery schedule, so in order to comply with the agreement with Argentina, the company diverted half of production of mAbxience in the United States to finish there “vials”, as vaccines already packaged for distribution are called. From Garín, an average of 6 million doses are dispatched per week.

More vaccines

On Friday, 370,000 additional doses of component 1 of the Sputnik V vaccine arrived in Ezeiza, with which the country has so far received 5,250,540 doses. In addition to the 218,000 AstraZeneca arriving Sunday from COVAX, it is expected that on Monday morning another Aerolineas Argentinas flight will leave for Russia to search for more vaccines than those produced by the Gamaleya Institute and on Tuesday another would leave for China to bring more by Sinopharm.

According to Public vaccination monitorTo date, 4,197,945 vaccines have been distributed and 3,474,415 have been applied. 2,824,344 people and 650,071 received the first dose, both.

AS