Panama seeking Russian and Chinese vaccines

Panama is in a global race to acquire covid vaccines with the Russian Sputnik V of the Gamaleya Institute and the Chinese CoronaVac of the pharmaceutical company Sinovac as prime targets.

Eduardo Ortega Barría, the advisor to the Panama Covid-19 Vaccine Research Consortium and National Secretary of Science, Technology, and Innovation, confirmed that in the last four weeks they have worked to expand the country’s portfolio of vaccines against Covid-19.

The country has an adequate number of agreed vaccines – 7.2 million doses – but it is necessary to bring more doses early in this second quarter or in the third quarter of the year.

The 7.2 million doses were agreed with the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer / BioNTech, Astra Zeneca / Oxford University, and with the Covax Mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO). Meanwhile, 300,000 doses of the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson are under negotiation.

Barria said that the negotiations are focused on several aspects: how many doses can be delivered, on what date they can be delivered and the regulatory aspects related to the authorization of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the WHO, among other drug regulatory agents.

He said that the purchase of 3 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine (based on adenovirus and that requires two doses) for 1.5 million people has not yet been agreed upon and that negotiations with the pharmaceutical company Sinovac are ongoing.