at the end of March the doses would arrive in Argentina

The active ingredient in the coronavirus vaccine AstraZeneca and Oxford which takes place in Argentina would be ready to travel to Mexico -where they will be packed- January 18. However, it is estimated that the ready-to-apply doses will reach the country shortly after end of March.

The director general of American regional organizations and mechanisms, Efraín Guadarrama, communicated via his Twitter account that the date has been advanced for the transfer of vaccines from Argentina to Mexico. Thursday, he announced that the component would be ready to arrive in Mexico “in 10 days”, a date that will be respected next Monday.

The two countries will be responsible for producing the doses needed for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The AstraZeneca vaccine and the University of Oxford was approved by the National Administration of Drugs, Food and Medical Technology (ANMAT) on December 30, for its emergency use. Thus Argentina became one of the first countries to have approved it, after the authorization given a few hours earlier by the UK health authority.

However, we will have to wait between two and three months more so that it can be applied in the country. When the agreement for the local production of the vaccine was announced, at the mAbxience factory in Garín, the heads of the laboratory belonging to the Insud group had already anticipated that they would not arrive before the average of the first quarter of 2021, because they have to complex product validation processes, which ends in Mexico and from there will be distributed to all of Latin America except Brazil.

As already published Bugle, the first doses of the Oxford vaccine would be available in Argentina between late March and early April.

This date was ratified in the last hours by the Minister of Health, Ginés González García, who estimated for “the end of March” the arrival of “a very large number of doses of the vaccine that is manufactured here ”, by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

In the meantime, the country would have at its disposal the new doses of the Russian vaccine. Sputnik V which arrive between January and February. They should come from both the first and the second dose. The 9 million doses of vaccine from the Covax fund would also arrive by March or April, the Pan American Health Organization told this newspaper.

As of today, there is a stock equivalent to 10 million doses AstraZeneca vaccine that were produced in the country. In mid-January, this volume of the active ingredient of the vaccine will be sent to Mexico for packaging. There, the Liomont laboratory must validate the batches and demonstrate safety and hygiene during the fragmentation and filling phase. Then, AstraZeneca must distribute the vaccines according to the commitments made in Latin America: Argentina bought 22.4 million doses.

The approval of the vaccine by the ANMAT could be finalized before the end of the year despite the fact that the phase III trial suffered some methodological setbacks and that the AstraZeneca laboratory had to repeat part of the experiment.

The problem arose when a group of volunteers had received two standard doses of the vaccine, with an efficacy of 62.1%. For an inconvenience attributed to an accident, another group received half dose then a full dose, bringing the efficacy to 90%.

Technically, this vaccine against the coronavirus is already able to be applied in our country, like that of Pfizer, which received the same approval from the local regulatory agency, and Sputnik V, which had another type. authorization, via a resolution from the Ministry of Health following the recommendation of ANMAT.

However, the Russian vaccine is the only one currently in demand in the country, as the contract with Pfizer is suspended. Vaccination with Sputnik began in December among health workers. They are 300,000 Dose of component 1. According to the last update, carried out on Friday, at least one third (107,542) has already been applied.

DD