Havana, Nov 5 (ACN) The president of the Cuban BioCubaFarma Biotech Conglomerate Eduardo Martinez announced that the first official meeting with World Health Organization (WHO) representatives to address the inclusion of Cuban COVID-19 vaccines in that organization’s use of emergency list will take place this month.
The process includes the handing over to the WHO of the vaccines’ records and visits by an expert team to Cuban vaccine plants, said Martinez who added that Cuba has already presented other vaccines to the international organization before.
Martinez made the announcement during a tour on Friday with local and foreign reporters of a new biotechnological compound raised in the Special Development Zone located in the locality of Mariel, west of Havana.
Compound director Engineer Catalina Alvarez said the production of the first lots of the COVID-19 vaccines Abdala is expected to kick off in the second half of December.
The plant has capacity to bottle 12 thousand vials per hour as executives expect to produce over 30 million vaccine doses in six months; the plant also has a second bottling line to fill three thousand vials per hour.
The facility will also produce other drugs and vaccines developed by the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center.
The plant called CIGB-Mariel is the result of a 460-million-peso investment, including 147 million dollars as part of joint collaboration between BioCubaFarma Conglomerate and the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center.
