Inside the Mexican laboratory Liomont, where the AstraZeneca vaccine for Latin America is packaged, last February 22.- / AFP
Latin America has tens of millions of AstraZeneca vaccines stored in warehouses.
An Argentine laboratory is manufacturing 18 million doses every month.
But at the moment they cannot be used due to lack of basic supplies such as filters, sterile bags, vials or biological excipients in the Mexican laboratory in charge of finishing the product.
The "Latin American vaccine" against covid-19, produced in a Buenos Aires factory owned by Argentine businessman Hugo Sigman and financed by the foundation of Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, has been hampered by a global shortage problem.
Sigman believes that we will have to keep waiting until April.
The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca gave up almost a year ago to profit from its vaccine for the duration of the pandemic and, through the Bill Gates Foundation, looked for philanthropists to bear the high costs of production.
In Latin America he met Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world.
Slim agreed on the condition that the vaccine be manufactured on the mainland.
AstraZeneca decided that the active ingredient would be manufactured at mAbxience, a modern Argentine facility belonging to the Insud group, owned by the marriage of biochemist Silvia Gold and doctor Hugo Sigman.
The basic product would then be sent to the Mexican Liomont laboratories, which would take care of finishing and packaging it for AstraZeneca to carry out distribution.
But the plan has collided with a planetary shortage of such elementary products as saline solutions, vials and syringes.
Schott, the world's largest vial manufacturer, warned as early as June that it could not cope with orders for hundreds of millions of bottles.
The following month, Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, admitted that the problem was not "making the vaccine itself, but filling the vials," because there were not enough on the market.
The mAbxience laboratory began manufacturing on schedule and on January 20 exported the equivalent of six million vaccines to Mexico.
On February 2, it exported another six million doses.
Right now, mAbxience produces at a rate of 18 million doses each month and in April it will reach 25 million doses per month.
This material remains paralyzed, in the Mexican laboratories of Liomont and in Argentina, waiting for the shortage of vials to be resolved.
A Liomont spokesman assured that the necessary supplies were already "guaranteed" and that the packaging would begin "soon".
"The first batches will be packed next week," said Martha Delgado, Mexico's undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs.
However, packaged doses will have to wait three to four weeks for regulatory authorities to verify their stability, sterility, and dosage.
"These times cannot be shortened because they are biological processes," explained the official.
"Once the first batches have been verified, the release of the following will be faster," he added.
To alleviate the delay, AstraZeneca offered to export part of the production of its factory in India to Argentina and Mexico.
According to Hugo Sigman, 580,000 doses have already arrived from this source and another 580,000 will arrive in March.
He also found another temporary solution.
As the AstraZeneca vaccine is not yet authorized in the United States (the green light is expected for April), the multinational's US factory, with no shortage problems, will be in charge of carrying out Liomont's task for a few weeks.
"We have already sent the equivalent of 6,400,000 doses from Argentina to the United States and next week another 6,400,000 will be released," Sigman said.
This is a frustrating situation.
Liomont, whose plant is one of the largest in Latin America (1.6 million square meters), had to undertake an adaptation process at its facilities to have the necessary technology and prepare for mass production.
"Liomont has excellent laboratories and has done everything that had to be done, but it has run into a planetary problem that Europe also suffers: there is a high demand for inputs and little supply," says Hugo Sigman.
There are hundreds of vaccines in development or already on the market and a race against the clock to immunize the 7.5 billion people on the planet.
But the world industry does not produce more than 20,000 million vials a year, destined for ordinary pharmaceutical production.
The irruption of vaccines has caused a situation close to collapse.
"No one could be prepared for this, it will take months for the supply to normalize," Sigman said.