07/22/2021 13:30
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 07/22/2021 1:30 PM
With a long email in English sent on July 7,
Cecilia Nicolini
, the adviser to President Alberto Fernández in charge of negotiating the purchase of vaccines with foreign laboratories, sought to pressure the
Russian Fund for Direct Investment
to complain about the delay in the delivery of second doses of the Sputnik V vaccine. That email was never answered for a reason.
It was never read
.
Sources in the health area who are aware of the minute by minute negotiations between Argentina and Russia for vaccines assured Clarín on Thursday that in Moscow they
did not take into account Nicolini's request,
and that the shipment of vaccines that arrived a few days later - which includes some doses of the second component - it was sent only when the Russian authorities considered it appropriate to do so.
This data is decisive, because in Russia in recent months a controversy has been unleashed within the government of Vladimir Putin over the fate of Sputnik V. Several officials of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation prefer that the Russian Fund for Direct Investment
leave to export components one and two of Sputnik V already finished
and that, in any case, the active principles are sold to other countries so that the filtering and packaging process is completed outside of Russia.
The idea of that sector of the Putin government is to privilege the vaccination of Russian citizens, since the country, which was very affected by the pandemic in 2020, has very low vaccination rates despite the fact that it managed to
develop a very high inoculation route. effective
.
In addition to the plants in South Korea and India, Sputnik V is already being manufactured in Argentina, where the active principle is received and filtered and packaged in a plant that the Richmond laboratory rented for that purpose.
These days, the president of Richmond, businessman
Marcelo Figueiras
, is in Russia negotiating with the Russian Fund for Direct Investment to send him enough batches of the active ingredients necessary to manufacture the two components of Sputnik V.
In any case, Richmond's medium-term plan is that at some point it will no longer be necessary to wait for those Russian shipments, so that the vaccine can be manufactured from scratch in the country.
For this reason, Figueiras
set up a trust to raise the funds
necessary to expand a plant in Richmond to carry out the entire process from next year, and thus sell the vaccine in the years to come. According to industry sources, this is the only feasible business for a private company with the COVID vaccine, since it is not profitable to focus only on filtering and packaging.