TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran’s campaign to vaccinate its population against the coronavirus and promote itself as an emerging vaccine manufacturer began when health authorities announced on Tuesday that the country’s third vaccination in the country is the phase of clinical trials reached.
Details about its production, however, remain sparse.
Although Iran, with a population of more than 80 million, has so far imported foreign vaccines from Russia, China, India and Cuba to cover more than 1.2 million people, concerns about the slow pace of vaccinations have fueled Iran’s drive. to develop local vaccines, illustrated as richer countries take up the bulk of the vaccine dose worldwide.
Iranian scientists, as elsewhere in the world, are trying to justify the typical year-long process of developing vaccines in a matter of months – a task that has become urgent as the country struggles to stem the worst virus outbreak in the Middle East and its economy. harsh US sanctions.
However, the details are few about the production efforts of the Islamic Republic. Two other Iranian vaccines are also in the clinical trials phase, with the most advanced, called Barekat, being tested on 300 people so far.
The government said 20,000 volunteers in the capital of Tehran and other cities would soon receive Iran’s new vaccine, called Fakhra, which an official told the state-run media as ‘100% safe’, without any evidence or data to provide to support the claim. . Earlier this week, the government launched a vaccine production plant that he said could make 3 million doses a day.
The vaccine, which was launched on state television on Tuesday, was made by a subsidiary of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, known as the Organization for Research and Innovation.
As with the Barekat vaccine still in the early stages of clinical trials, the company used inactivated coronaviruses from 35,000 samples to make the new vaccine, a traditional technology based on culturing groups of the virus and then killing them. By comparison, Western drug manufacturers are taking a newer approach to the field of targeting the outer structure of the coronavirus, a method that has never before been approved for widespread use.
Iran’s fragmented approach to domestic vaccine production, with entities ranging from state-owned pharmaceutical conglomerates to the Ministry of Defense working separately on at least six different vaccines, reflects the country’s wider fractional rivalry and competitive power structures.
At a ceremony attended by dignitaries in Tehran on Tuesday, Iranian state television broadcast footage of only a single volunteer receiving the Fakhra vaccine, named after Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was killed in a attack in November blaming Israel to Israel..
While Fakhrizadeh was known for leading the country’s decommissioned nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s, Iran developed itself as a leader in the local coronavirus vaccine. The son of Fakhrizadeh was the first to receive the new vaccine.
According to figures released on Tuesday, more than 1.7 million people in Iran have been infected and 61,427 people killed. This is the highest death toll in the Middle East.
Iran formally launched its limited vaccination campaign last month, wiping out Russian Sputnik V vaccine to health workers and those with chronic health conditions. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banned Iran from importing American and British vaccinations, a reflection of the deep-rooted mistrust in the West.
Nevertheless, Iran later said it would receive 4.2 million doses of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and drugmaker AstraZeneca in the UK through the global COVAX initiative, created to ensure that countries with low and middle incomes have fair access to vaccines.
The Ministry of Health has promised to vaccinate all adults in the country by the end of September, although it is uncertain how the government will achieve the ambitious goal. Iran says it expects to import doses for more than 16 million people from COVAX.
The government has claimed that harsh US sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump in 2018 undermine attempts to buy foreign-made vaccines and set up mass vaccination campaigns such as those in the US and Europe. Although international banks and financial institutions are often reluctant to handle Iranian transactions for fear of being fined or excluded from the US market, US sanctions do provide specific medicine and humanitarian aid to Iran.
___
Associated Press authors Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.