Cuban vaccines neutralize Omicron, say scientists | News

The Cuban vaccines of the Sovereign series, developed and produced by the Finlay and Abdala Institute, of the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, both in Havana, showed what the scientists called "high capacity to neutralize", the Omicron variant of the virus that causes the Covid-19, in laboratory tests, the Cuban health authorities reported on Monday.

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That was the result of a viral neutralization clinical trial carried out by the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), in Havana, whose head of the Center for Research, Diagnosis and Reference, Guadalupe Guzmán Tirado, explained the fundamental findings.

In people immunized with the basic scheme of Soberana 02 and Abdala, 90 percent or more of the vaccinated seroconversion of antibodies to the Omicron variant was observed. In the case of those who were reinforced, in a fourth dose, with Soberana 01 and Abdala, 100 percent showed seroconversion of antibodies against Ómicron.

Guzmán Tirado said she was very happy with these results, which she described as very good and which speak positively of the vaccination and booster schedule in Cuba.

The effectiveness of Cuban vaccines would be possible to verify in the numerical trends of the epidemic in Cuba in recent weeks, according to researchers from the Center for Molecular Immunology, in Havana, who pointed out that the current wave of disease has behaved in the country in a different way to how it has been seen in the rest of the world.

Accordingly, the health authorities said that an unvaccinated person is a human being with a high risk of getting worse and dying if they are hit by the virus that causes Covid-19, while a shift towards the ages is observed in Cuba. more advanced severe disease.

In this wave of Omicron there have been no deaths in the universe of pediatric ages, although they highlighted that children under two years of age (unvaccinated) have a 2.5 times greater risk of getting sick in relation to those between two and 18 years, and a risk two times greater with respect to the general population.

As of Monday, 10.5 million people have received at least one dose of one of the Cuban vaccines and 9.8 million people have a complete vaccination schedule, which represents 87.7 percent of the Cuban population. . A total of 4.8 million people have booster doses.