TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran’s campaign to inoculate its population against the coronavirus and promote itself as an emerging vaccine maker moved forward when health officials announced on Tuesday that the country’s third home vaccine has reached the testing stage clinical features.
Details on its production, however, remained scarce.
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 animated the movement of the Iran to develop vaccines produced locally. the wealthiest nations get the majority of vaccine doses worldwide.
Iranian scientists, as in other parts of the world, are rushing to condense the process typically of years of vaccine development in a few months – a task that has taken on urgency as the country struggles to contain the worst virus outbreak in the Middle East and its economy wobbles severe American sanctions.
But details about the Islamic Republic’s vaccine production efforts are sparse. Two other Iranian vaccines are also undergoing clinical trials, with the most advanced vaccine, called Barekat, tested on 300 people so far.
The government said 20,000 volunteers in the capital Tehran and other cities will soon receive Iran’s new vaccine, called Fakhra, which an official described to state media as “100% safe” without providing any evidence or data to support the claim. . . Earlier this week, the government launched a vaccine production plant that claims to be able to produce 3 million doses a day.
The vaccine featured on state TV on Tuesday was created by an affiliate of Iran’s Ministry of Defense, known as the Research and Innovation Organization.
As with the Barekat vaccine still in the initial phase of clinical trials, the company used inactivated coronaviruses from 35,000 samples to make the new vaccine, a traditional technology based on culturing the virus and then eliminating it. In comparison, Western drug makers are taking a more recent gene-based approach to reaching the peaks in the external structure of the coronavirus, a method that had never been approved for widespread use before.
Iran’s fragmented approach to domestic vaccine production, with entities ranging from state pharmaceutical conglomerates to the Ministry of Defense working separately on at least six different vaccines, reflects the country’s broader factional rivalries and competing power structures.
In a ceremony attended by senior officials in Tehran on Tuesday, Iranian state TV broadcast images of just a single volunteer receiving the Fakhra vaccine, in honor of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was killed in an attack in November that Iran attributed to Israel.
Although Fakhrizadeh was known for leading the country’s dismantled nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s, Iran praised him as the leader of the national coronavirus vaccine development campaign. Fakhrizadeh’s son was the first to receive the injection of the new vaccine.
The coronavirus infected more than 1.7 million people in Iran and killed 61,427, according to data from the Ministry of Health released on Tuesday – the highest death toll in the Middle East.
Iran formally launched its limited vaccination campaign last month, distributing the Russian Sputnik V vaccine for health professionals and people with chronic health conditions. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has banned Iran from importing American and British vaccines, a reflection of their deep distrust of the West.
However, Iran later said it would receive 4.2 million doses of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca through the global COVAX initiative, which was created to ensure that low- and middle-income countries have access fair to vaccines.
The Ministry of Health has promised to vaccinate all adults in the country by the end of September, although it remains uncertain how the government will achieve this ambitious goal. Iran says it hopes to import doses for more than 16 million people from COVAX.
The government has claimed that the harsh American sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump in 2018 undermine efforts to buy foreign vaccines and launch mass vaccination campaigns, such as those emerging in the U.S. and Europe. Although banks and international financial institutions often hesitate to deal with Iranian transactions for fear of being fined or excluded from the American market, U.S. sanctions have specific restrictions on medicines and humanitarian aid to Iran.
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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.