TEHRAN – PastoCoVac, jointly developed by the Pasteur Institute of Iran and the Finlay Institute of Cuba, is to join the public vaccination drive against coronavirus next week.

“At present, 120,000 doses of this vaccine have been delivered to the Ministry of Health, which will be used for general vaccination,” Alireza Biglari, director of the Pasteur Institute of Iran, said at a joint press conference with Vicente Verez Bencomo, director of Cuba’s Finlay Institute of Vaccines, which was held at the Iranian Ministry of Health.

"We are determined to submit the documentation of this vaccine to the World Health Organization upon completion of the information. In addition to Cuba, a clinical trial with good quality has been conducted in eight cities of the country for 24,000 volunteers,” Biglari added.

“The first industrial production line of this vaccine will start in September and we hope to be operational in the early fall with a capacity of 3 million doses.  At the end of the fall, the second line with the same capacity will be put into operation. In addition to the COVID-19 vaccine, this product line can also be used to produce other vaccines.”

The Cuban official, for his part, said: “The world was amazed by the outbreak of COVID-19 and we also knew we had to respond quickly to this pandemic. Therefore, we used the experience of pneumococcal vaccine to produce Covid-19 vaccine and our cooperation was formed to produce a vaccine called Soberana02 (in Cuba) and (PastoCoVac) in Iran.”

The efficacy of this vaccine in two doses of injection was 65% and using the booster dose (Soberana Plus), we were able to increase it to 91.2%. Thus, based on the joint findings of Iran and Cuba in the third phase, we will have Strong documentation for efficacy to submit to the World Health Organization, he concluded.

Photo: Alireza Biglari, director of the Pasteur Institute of Iran (R), held a joint press conference with Vicente Verez Bencomo, director of Cuba’s Finlay Institute of Vaccines, at the Iranian Ministry of Health on Thursday.