TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran’s campaign to inoculate its population against coronavirus and promote itself as an emerging vaccine manufacturer claimed that health authorities announced on Tuesday that the country’s third domestic vaccine has reached clinical trials.
However, details about its production remained weak.
Although Iran, with a population of over 80 million, has so far imported foreign vaccines from Russia, China, India and Cuba to cover more than 1.2 million people, concerns about its encouraging vaccination rate have fueled Iran’s efforts to developing locally produced vaccines richer nations get most of the vaccine doses worldwide.
Iranian scientists, as in other parts of the world, are rushing to condense the typical process of years to develop vaccines in a few months – a task that has become urgent as the country struggles to stop the worst outbreak of Middle East virus and its economy tough US sanctions.
But little is known about the efforts to produce vaccines in the Islamic Republic. Two other Iranian vaccines are also in the phase of clinical trials, with the most advanced, called Barekat, being tested so far on 300 people.
The government said 20,000 volunteers in Tehran’s capital and other cities would soon receive Iran’s new vaccine, called Fakhra, which an official described to the state media as “100% safe” without providing evidence or data that to support the statement. . Earlier this week, the government launched a vaccine factory that it says can make 3 million doses a day.
The vaccine introduced on state television on Tuesday was created by an affiliate of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, known as the Organization for Research and Innovation.
As with the Barekat vaccine 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 cultivating batches of viruses and then killing it. By comparison, Western drug manufacturers are taking a new gene-based approach to targeting spikes on the outer structure of the coronavirus, a method that has never 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 greater rivalries and competing power structures.
At a ceremony attended by senior officials in Tehran on Tuesday, Iranian state television aired footage of a single volunteer who received the Fakhra vaccine, named after Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was killed in an attack. since November that Iran put Israel.
While Fakhrizadeh was leading the country’s nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s, Iran praised him as a leader in the internal development of the coronavirus vaccine. Fakhrizadeh’s son was the first to receive the new vaccine.
The coronavirus infected more than 1.7 million people in Iran and killed 61,427, according to health ministry figures released Tuesday – the highest death toll in the Middle East.
Iran officially launched limited vaccination campaign last month, eliminating Russian Sputnik V vaccine health workers and those with chronic health conditions. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has banned imports from Iran American and British vaccines, a reflection of his deep-seated distrust of the West.
However, Iran later said it would receive 4.2 million doses of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and British doctor 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 how the government will achieve this ambitious goal remains uncertain. Iran says it expects to import doses for more than 16 million people from COVAX.
The government has argued that harsh US sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump in 2018 undermine efforts to buy foreign-made vaccines and launch mass inoculation campaigns, such as those making progress in the US and Europe. Although international banks and financial institutions are often reluctant to deal with Iranian transactions for fear of being fined or blocked on the US market, US sanctions have specific drug exemptions and humanitarian aid for Iran.
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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat of Tehran, Iran and Isabel DeBre of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to the report.