Adolescents will receive anti-COVID-19 reinforcement in Cuba

This Wednesday, some 848,000 adolescents in Cuba, between 12 and 18 years old, who have completed six months of the complete primary vaccination schedule, will receive the booster dose of the national anti-COVID-19 immunogenic drugs.

The proposal was adopted at the meeting, the day before, among President Miguel Díaz-Canel, scientists, and experts who participate in science and technological innovation activities to confront the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which is causing the pandemic.

In this Caribbean nation, the reinforcement was only applicable to people 19 years of age and older and to date six million 422,038 people have this fourth injection.

With these figures, the country occupies one of the first places among the regions in the world with the highest number of booster doses administered per population, according to data from the Oxford University statistics site, Our World In Data.

The German journal Toxicology recently published an article on the safety of the Sovereign 02 anti-COVID-19 vaccine, in a preclinical study where variables such as pain, injection site inflammation and immune response were evaluated.

The text reported that Soberana 02, developed by the Finlay Vaccine Institute (IFV), was well tolerated and no clinically relevant changes, pain, local effects or adverse systemic toxicological changes or deaths were observed.

These preliminary results allowed Cuban regulatory authorities to authorize clinical trials in humans, the article highlighted.

For its part, the British group The Lancet Discovery Science published another scientific article on Abdala, which also shows that it is safe, well tolerated and induces a powerful immune response against SARS-CoV-2.

The text was published in the journal eClinical Medicine, a peer-reviewed open access medical journal.

Abdala, designed by the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), the first anti-COVID-19 vaccine in Latin America, will be a pioneer in the country in submitting its dossier to the World Health Organization to start the process of international recognition.

Cuba has another immunogenic med for emergency use (Soberana Plus), also from the IFV, and two more candidates: Soberana 01, from the same center; and Mambisa, from the CIGB, and the only one in the country to apply nasally.