03/28/2021 6:01 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 03/28/2021 9:47 AM
At the meeting of the Federal Health Council this afternoon, the provincial health ministers endorsed the change in vaccination strategy that other countries such as the United Kingdom are already implementing: deferring the second dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
The idea is to give the first dose to more people to cope with the second wave and delay the second.
When this is applied, it
has to be the same as the first
, because the different vaccines cannot be interchanged.
In the meantime, more doses are expected to be added.
For example, this Sunday 218,000 vaccines will arrive from AstraZeneca, part of the batch of 1.9 million that Argentina will receive from the COVAX fund between now and May.
These would be the first AstraZeneca brand vaccines to be used in the country, but
not the first AstraZeneca vaccines to be used
.
A play on words?
No:
Covishield
, which has been in use since February, is the same vaccine, with a different trade name.
Covishield comes from the Serum Institute, a giant vaccine producer in India.
The Covax doses come from AstraZeneca-SK Bioscience, a plant in South Korea.
But it is also expected that
the delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines produced in Argentina will
begin in the third week of April
, the active ingredient of which is manufactured at the mAbxience plant in Garín and then packaged in the northern hemisphere.
There will be about 900,000 doses that will come from the United States, as well as the 3.5 million that will arrive in May.
And here the question arises: can someone who has already received the first dose of Covishield receive the second with the AstraZeneca from Korea or the one
made in Argentina
?
Similarly, if someone is vaccinated from next week with a vaccine delivered by COVAX, can they complete the immunization when the 580,000 units of the
second component of Covishield
that are still missing come?
The answer is yes, as they could also complete the vaccination from April with the vaccines produced here.
The vaccine development, carried out together with the University of Oxford, is exactly the same, and it started from a chimpanzee adenovirus.
The production process in the different plants is also the same, and in fact, before the start of manufacturing, what is called
technology transfer was carried out
, to align all the processes.
In addition, unlike Sputnik V, the second component of AstraZeneca is the same as the first, so there is no disadvantage in this regard in deferring the second application and using the second dose to vaccinate more people.
ACE
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