2023-10-21 07:10:16
This week, the Anmat officially registered the first Argentine vaccine against covid-19. After almost three years of development, the “Arvac Cecilia Grierson” was presented by the ministers of science and health, who highlighted its high effectiveness in awakening a effective immune response against SARS-CoV-2, which is around 91%. And it is also a safe vaccine that is easy to update and store.
With this development, achieved by a large group of researchers from Conicet, the University of San Martín and the private laboratory Cassará, Argentina joined the prestigious and select handful of countries in the world that managed to develop, test and register a highly effective vaccine against the coronavirus. With this approval, the laboratory can locally produce a vaccine that is efficient, safe (does not generate serious side effects) and with competitive costs with those currently on the global market. In fact, Cassará explained to this newspaper that they are already betting on exporting batches of Arvac to other Latin American nations.
Costs. The project was truly massive since, in one phase or another, the public-private consortium ended up receiving contributions from nearly 600 scientists and 25 institutions. “The investment was three years of work, a state contribution of $1.7 billion,” Filmus responded to this medium when asked about the amounts. And to this laboratory sources added their own contribution: about US$ 7 million. Everyone hopes to be able, in the medium term, to amortize these costs since this vaccine can be purchased in pesos, to reinforce the immunization of the local population.
As Juliana Cassataro, project leader and researcher at Unsam and Conicet, explained in a press conference, “getting to this point where Anmat analyzed the test data and decided to ‘register’ it took a lot of teamwork. And then we had to complete the rehearsal phases. In total, we tested it on 2,094 people over 18 years of age, in a dozen health institutions.”
Filmus concluded by stating that “it is a historic day for Argentine science because, in just three years, we managed to completely make a high-quality vaccine. We are the first in South America to achieve this and this leaves us with the know-how to be able to develop, in the future, new immunizations against other possible pathologies.”
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