Just over a week ago, Argentina’s Health Minister, Carla Vizzotti, and her Cuban counterpart, Dr José Angel Portal, signed a letter of intent that may lead to the joint production in Argentina of some of the vaccines Cuba has developed against COVID-19. The collaboration will be, the letter says, for ‘the immunisation of the population of Cuba and Argentina, as well as of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean’.
Symbolically, the outline agreement was initialled at the headquarters of the Cuban medicines’ regulatory authority, the Centre for State Control of Medicines, Medical Equipment and Devices, which is expected to rule very soon on the efficacy and licensing of Cuba’s Soberana 02 and Abdala vaccines.
According to Dr Vizzotti, the idea is not just to fully develop, produce and apply the vaccines for Latin America and the Caribbean, but also to provide inputs, explore the possibility of purchasing, enable the support required to scale up production, and more generally to expand the possibility of research in other areas of health, science and technology.