Cuba’s regulatory authority approves emergency use of Abdala coronavirus vaccine

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cuba’s Center for the State Control of Medicines, Equipment and Medical Devices (CECMED) granted this Friday (9) authorization for emergency use of the Cuban vaccine against the Abdala coronavirus, which in its clinical trials showed an efficacy of 92.2%.

The authorization was granted “once it was confirmed that it complies with the requirements and parameters demanded in terms of quality, safety and efficacy for this type of procedure”, informed the CECMED in a communiqué.

Abdala, one of the five formulas developed by the Caribbean country against Covid-19 and the first to reach the vaccine category, is a subunit immunogen with an intramuscular administration scheme of three doses in 28 days and was created by the state-owned Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology.

CUBA BREAKS RECORD FOR COVID-19 INFECTIONS

Cuba registered on Thursday (8) two new absolute daily records since the beginning of the pandemic: 3,819 cases of Covid-19, and 26 deaths, including a two-month-old baby, informed the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap).

The previous maximum number of infections reported in one day had occurred the day before, with 3,664. The death toll was 21 on Monday.

The most difficult situation is in the western province of Matanzas, which concentrated today the largest number of sick people of the day with 1,327, the first time that the territory has exceeded 1,000 SARS-Cov-2 positives.

In that region, on the verge of health collapse and with an incidence of more than 1,300 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, patients are accumulating in hospital corridors and there is a shortage of medicine, a situation that many Internet users have denounced on social networks.

Havana and the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba followed Matanzas today with 645 and 387 cases, respectively.