Colombia took another step to gain ground in terms of health sovereignty: in the last few hours, the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech announced that there will be a new vaccine production plant.
This is the second manufacturing center for these drugs in Colombia, after Rionegro, which will start operating in the middle of this year. Between both projects, the country could produce up to 160 million doses of vaccines a year.
The two initiatives propose to consolidate a biotechnology market in several phases. According to Sinovac in a statement, the Bogotá plant will start operating in three steps.
As in Rionegro –where a vaccine production plant is being built with the investment of the company VaxThera–, the first objective is to establish filling and packaging services, also known in the pharmaceutical industry as fill and finish.
Sinovac pointed out that the idea is that this part of the production chain will include “all kinds of vaccines.” Projections suggest that this phase could start in 2023. From then on, the idea is that the plant has the capacity to produce between 50 and 60 million doses of vaccines each year.
Sinovac VP Weining Meng said there will be two more phases. The next will consist of the local formulation of the vaccines and the last one will seek to develop the entire production chain in the plant itself.
Weining Meng assured that they hope to establish a “vaccine industry” in the next 10 years in Colombian territory.
From ProColombia, the government agency that promotes foreign investment in national territory, they celebrated the decision of the Chinese pharmaceutical company.
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“We are very pleased with Sinovac’s investment announcement in Colombia, as it will contribute to the country’s pharmaceutical safety, job creation, technology transfer and good manufacturing practices,” said Flavia Santoro, president of ProColombia. .
Among other things, it was learned that the Chinese pharmaceutical company plans to invest a total of 100 million dollars in this project, which will return health sovereignty to Colombia.
This concept implies that the country could have greater autonomy to resolve its own public health issues. The coronavirus pandemic caused sovereignty to become one of the priorities of the Ministry of Health.
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The fact that Colombia did not have its own vaccine production system made it dependent on the will of external actors to cover its own demand for immunization against covid-19.
Recover lost time
In the academy, especially, public health experts have seen favorably that Colombia is once again interested in the production of vaccines, which ceased to be carried out in 2001, when the National Institute of Health closed its last plant.
“The issue of cooperation and coordinated work is key,” said Pedro Amariles, professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Antioquia. “The private sector benefits and the country develops its own vaccine production capabilities,” added Amariles.
And he noted that it is essential to make these projects sustainable and competitive. “The country could generate a response capacity for different infections and that is what the new technologies of messenger RNA and viral vectors allow,” said the academic.
This, he explained, would allow Colombia to have a broad portfolio of vaccines for different viruses.
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