The director of Medicines and Technologies of the Ministry of Health, Leonardo Arregocés, confirmed that according to the suggestions of the World Health Organization, in Colombia about 10 million people would be vaccinated against the coronavirus the first year.
“The groups prioritized to receive the vaccine first are health personnel who are at greater risk of acquiring the disease, adults over 60 years of age and people with some underlying disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, among others “the official said.
He added that Colombia has been talking with manufacturers of possible vaccines: “Colombia is part of the COVAX mechanism, which is a multinational effort that seeks the early and equitable distribution of the vaccine or vaccines that demonstrate its effectiveness among the countries that have adhered to this mechanism. Additionally, it has a diplomatic agenda that the Foreign Ministry is leading several months ago and has been successful. Within this agenda we have had direct conversations with the manufacturers of the vaccine candidates, which gives us another option to have it as soon as there is evidence of its effectiveness. “
Arregocés also assures that from the Ministry of Health “models have been generated that allow estimating the necessary resources to finance the vaccination strategy in different scenarios”, and stated that “the country already has a great advance in technical capacity in vaccination because it has one of the best vaccination schemes. “
He stated that there are currently around 170 possible vaccines in development, of which 24 are already in clinical experimentation phases. This means that an immune response has already been demonstrated or is being evaluated when applied to humans.
“When a vaccine candidate completes phase 2 successfully, it can be said that there is already evidence that it arouses an immune response, but this does not mean that the vaccine is ready. In phase three, the vaccine candidate is administered a large group of the population and it is compared with another group of equal size, which did not receive it, where after several months it is counted how many of the members of each group developed the disease and with what severity. If the proportion of people in the group that received the vaccine it is much less than those who did not receive it, we can say that the vaccine was effective, “explained the director of Medicines.
The most advanced possible vaccine has already been administered to nearly 10,000 patients in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa, as part of the phase 3 study, and this study is expected to produce results between next August and September.
And there are other possible vaccines that would enter phase 3 between August and October 2020.
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