[ad_1]
The National Institute for Food and Drug Surveillance (Invima) announced this Tuesday the sanitary approval for emergency use of the vaccine against covid-19 developed by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
It should be remembered that the National Government signed at the end of 2020 the acquisition of 10 million doses of this vaccine to cover five million people (two doses per person are required). In addition, the arrival of the first batch of this vaccine is expected in the coming weeks through the Covax mechanism.
(Also read: Why is mass vaccination important on the border with Brazil?)
Only four days ago the Ministry of Health had reported that the pharmaceutical AstraZeneca filed the necessary documentation, although Through the mechanism of early dialogues, Invima officials had already had access to part of the documentation, informed the director Julio César Aldana.
Invima had already given authorization for emergency use in the country for the Pfizer vaccine and also authorized the importation of the Sinovac vaccines, which are already being applied in the country.
Aldana also announced that the Moderna and Janssen vaccines are close to being approved under the same figure in the country.
It is worth remembering that the AstraZeneca and Oxford vaccine, which the United Kingdom was the first to administer massively in December, has already been approved by other countries, by the European Union (EU) and by the World Health Organization (WHO), which gave it the go-ahead for use in all populations and against all variants of Sars-CoV-2.
According to data released two months ago in The Lancet magazine, this vaccine has an average efficacy of 70 percent against the new coronavirus, a lower percentage than those shown by the products of Pfizer / BioNTech or Moderna, whose efficacy levels exceed 90 percent.
(See: This is how Sinovac’s 192,000 vaccines will be distributed, region by region)
However, many countries, including Colombia, opted for it because it is cheaper and easier to handle, since it does not need to be stored in deep freeze and is suitable for mass vaccination campaigns.
HEALTH UNIT
