A potential vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus will be available in Egypt by September once confirmed effective, Presidential Adviser for Health Affairs Mohamed Awad Tageldin announced Saturday.
He added that it has been confirmed that British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca in Cambridge, through close cooperation with the University of Oxford, has reached the final stages to produce a coronavirus vaccine.
A multinational company with a factory in Egypt is ready to produce the drug, Tageldin told the Extra News satellite channel in a phone call.
Preliminary clinical trials are in their second stage and showed a great success rate, he explained, with AstraZeneca’s president officially announcing that come September, it plans to produce 400 million doses of the vaccination to be fairly distributed all over the world.
According to Tageldin the company’s motives are not monetary, and come from a desire to rid the world of this pandemic.
Cooperation is also in place with a large Indian company that will see two billion doses of the vaccine planned to be produced globally between September 2020-2021.
He added that the British government helped in funding the vaccine’s research and the institutions supporting it, especially regarding its distribution to third world countries.
AstraZeneca announced that the vaccine would be sold at the production cost, he stressed, explaining that once company had announced its goal of spreading the vaccine fairly around the world, Egypt had requested a share once it the vaccine’s effectiveness is proven.
Tageldin said that other companies within the US, China and Europe have also been working to produce their own vaccines, to help ensure that the majority of the world’s population can get vaccinated.
Regarding the previously touted hydroxychloroquine drug, Tageldin said in a phone-call with the “Hadat al-Muwatten” program that its usage came after an unaudited statistical research on the drug was published by a British magazine.
Under the Egyptian treatment protocol, Health Minister Hala Zayed explained on Monday that hydroxychloroquine is effective for mild and moderate cases.
Egypt’s therapy trial for injecting coronavirus patients with plasma taken from recovered cases has been a success, Zayed announced Friday.
In a statement, she explained that the trial came as part of state efforts to help find a cure for the coronavirus disease.
The trial was applied to several critical cases in hospitals belonging under the Health Ministry, she added.
It showed promising initial results via a good recovery rate for patients, reducing the need for ventilators while increasing rates of recovery and hospital discharge.
Egypt on Sunday confirmed 39 additional deaths and 1,467 new coronavirus cases, bringing the country’s number of confirmed total cases so far to 34,079. 1,237 people have died from the virus in Egypt.
