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Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO) assured this Wednesday that the vaccine for COVID-19 would not be available in a massive way until 2022. In this regard, the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris, said he did not believe “that we will only have a vaccine in 2022” and dismissed the statements as an alarm.
It was Swaminathan who declared: “Many think that early next year there will come a panacea that will solve everything, but it will not. There is a long process of evaluation, licensing, manufacturing and distribution (…) It is the first time in history that we need billions of doses of a vaccine ”.
The above, after The alarms were raised after the announcement that the COVID vaccine developed by the University of Oxford with the AstraZeneca laboratory stopped its trials on suspicion of a serious adverse reaction that was identified in one of the volunteers from the United Kingdom.
This vaccine is in phase III and has been identified as one of the most effective in development.
In this context, the AstraZeneca laboratory said in a statement that the “standard review process of the company caused a pause in vaccination to allow the review of safety data.”
In this regard, the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris, referred on Wednesday, who was consulted about the vaccine at the University of Oxford and the pause it was generated, also about whether there should be a rethinking of the vaccination policy in relation to the new scenario .
“That does not mean that we cannot count on other vaccines. There are many companies that are testing vaccines, several that are already in clinical phase III. In fact, in Chile there are three vaccines that are in clinical phase III or that are going to do their clinical trial here ”, she assured.
“I do not believe that we will only have a vaccine in the year 2022, that is an alarm, I think that for the moment, unnecessary and it is not good to create that concern in the population”he argued.
Specifically about the Oxford vaccine pause, he asserted that “it is an expected adverse effect, which occurs regularly, which is within the possibilities.”
“What this patient had is transverse myelitis, that is, an inflammation of the spinal cord, probably caused by an interaction between the vaccine virus and the spinal cord”, he indicated.
Finally, he said that “the team of Health, Foreign Relations, Ministry of Sciences, ISP, Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Immunizations, and vaccine experts, are all working so that Chile can have a vaccine within the period we originally said, that is, in the first quarter of 2021 ”.
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