Cuba said on Monday its three-shot Abdala vaccine against the coronavirus had proved 92.28% effective in last-stage clinical trials.
The announcement came just days after the government said another homegrown vaccine, Soberana 2, had proved 62% effective with just two of its three doses.
“Hit by the pandemic, our scientists at the Finlay Institute and Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology have risen above all the obstacles and given us two very effective vaccines,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted.
The announcement came from state-run biopharmaceutical corporation BioCubaFarma, which oversees Finlay, the maker of Soberana 2, and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, the producer of Abdala.
World Health Organization (WHO) is yet to approve both vaccines but are expected to be granted emergency authority by local regulators soon.
Cuba’s biotech sector has exported vaccines for decades but the Caribbean’s largest island is facing its worst COVID-19 outbreak since the start of the pandemic following the arrival of more contagious variants, setting new records for daily coronavirus cases.
The Communist-run country has opted not to import foreign vaccines but to rely on its own. Some experts said it was a risky bet but it appears to have paid off, putting Cuba in position to burnish its scientific reputation, generate much-needed hard currency through exports and strengthen the vaccination drive worldwide.
Several countries from Argentina and Jamaica to Mexico, Vietnam and Venezuela have expressed an interest in buying Cuba’s vaccines.
RNA vaccines produced by Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership are said to be 90% effective in preventing Covid-19 infection in a real-world setting.
Cuba’s authorities have already started administering the experimental vaccines en-masse as part of “intervention studies” they hope will slow the spread of the virus. Almost a million of the country’s 11.2 million residents have been fully vaccinated to date.
Daily cases have halved in the capital, Havana, since the start of the vaccination campaign a month ago, using Abdala, according to official data. Cuba has reported a total of 169,365 COVID-19 cases and 1,170 deaths.
