[...]
Cuba’s success in developing COVID vaccine at a pace on par with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies may seem surprising. The country has been in economic and social turmoil. It’s been facing shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency, that sparked major street protests last summer. Pandemic lockdowns further battered the economy, depriving the country of one of it’s largest sources of revenue- tourism. U.S. President Trump in his final days in office, ramped up sanctions against the communist island, making it even harder for Cuba to import raw materials and pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment. But William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C. who’s written extensively about Cuba, wasn’t surprised that Cuba’s bet on a domestic vaccine paid off. LeoGrande says many people in the U.S. often underestimate the sophistication of the Cuban biotech industry.
“The reason is because there are large sectors of the Cuban economy that really don’t work very well,” he says. “And so the image that that creates here in the United States is that nothing works in Cuba. But the reality is that there are some sectors and biotechnology is one of them that work pretty well.”
LeoGrande says Cuba’s rapid development of 5 COVID vaccines was a major coup for the Caribbean nation.
“Cuba was able to vaccinate virtually the entire population without having to worry about access to foreign vaccines while most of the Third World is not yet vaccinated because the vaccines are all produced in the developed countries,” he says. “And finally, Cuba may be able to generate some revenue by selling the vaccines to other developing countries at a time when it is really in desperate need of foreign exchange currency.”
One potential stumbling block for exporting Cuban COVID vaccines is that hasn’t made progress in getting regulatory authorization for the products from the WHO. Individual countries are still welcome to authorize the shots locally if they so wish but a stamp of approval from WHO or another major regulator would make it far easier for Cuba to export these medical products.
Cuba has submitted Soberana 1, Soberana 2, Soberana Plus and Abdala for Emergency Use Listing by the WHO but their application hasn’t moved forward. Notes on the WHO’s website tracking the status of vaccine applications says that the regulatory body is still “awaiting information on strategy and timelines for submission” regarding the communist nation’s COVID vaccines.
[...]