The Government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo announced, through the official 19 Digital, that the Mechnikov Institute of Managua will produce the new Russian vaccine against covid-19, convacell, which has just received authorization to be marketed by Russia. This would be the third biological that supposedly will be manufactured in Nicaragua, but so far none has materialized.
“We plan to begin in the short term to transfer the technologies for the production of the Convacell vaccine to the platform of the Mechnikov Latin American Institute of Biotechnology in Nicaragua,” said Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA), which developed the vaccine.
The promise to produce anticovid vaccines in Nicaragua was made by the Ortega government since the end of 2020. In principle, it announced that the Sputnik V vaccine —created by the Gamaleya Institute and the first of the seven manufactured by Russia— would be produced in the country, but Until now there is no official explanation as to why its production did not begin, as it did in Argentina and Mexico.
Medical sources then explained to CONFIDENTIAL that the Russian plant in Managua is “incapable” of producing this type of biological because it does not have the technology and trained personnel to cultivate the virus and manipulate it genetically.
In October 2021, the regime once again revived the promise of anticovid vaccines by announcing that the Nicaraguan plant would produce the CoviVac vaccine, created by Russia’s Chumakov Center for Research and Development of Immunobiological Substances. As announced, they had already received the raw material to start manufacturing and projected that in January of this year it would be ready to be applied to the population.
However, there is no clear progress on this production. On the plant’s official website, they only announce that CoviVac is one of the vaccines that they will soon have in their catalog.
None of these three Russian vaccines has the approval of the World Health Organization (WHO) or other health agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States or the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
Little information about new vaccine
Little information is available about the Convacell vaccine. The manufacturer’s website details that it is created to be applied in the population between 18 and 60 years old and two intramuscular injections of 0.5 milliliters are applied, with an interval of 21 days.
“It is the first vaccine in the world based on the application of the components of an N protein of the nucleocapsid of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and not of a surface spike S protein. The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein N has the highest immunogenicity with respect to cellular and humoral immunity from the early stages of contagion and is characterized by high conservatism, not only having a high identity between SARS-CoV-2 lines but more than 90% homology with other betacoronaviruses”, they explain.
Due to its properties, this vaccine would produce different immune defense mechanisms that prevent the development of covid-19. This biological is stored at a temperature of 2 to 8 °С, in a place protected from light. There is no clear information on the percentage of effectiveness that it promises.
The FMBA assures that there are already several countries interested in importing it, but this will happen until the third phase of clinical trials is completed. Well, they have only concluded phase I and II.
“None of the volunteers who received the vaccine fell ill with COVID-19 during the entire observation period,” the manufacturers state.
Nicaragua Produces Flu Vaccines
According to the official website of the Mechnikov Institute, built with Russian funds and money from the coffers of the National Social Security Institute that the regime used discretionally, in the five years that have passed since its inauguration they have produced 15 million doses of FLU flu vaccines. -M and fractionated influenza virus vaccine, inactivated.
These vaccines are being applied in seven countries: Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
