L.The arrival of the first anti-Covid vaccines in the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the week marked the official start of the implementation of the national vaccination plan, building hopes for the beginning of the end of the new coronavirus pandemic.
It is “Covishield”, the vaccine developed by Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical AstraZeneca in conjunction with the University of Oxford in India, which arrived in the country on a flight from Madrid and previously landed in London after leaving India.
This was the first batch of doses to reach the country, some 20,000 vaccinations, of the more than 20 million the Dominican government expects to receive, as the AstraZeneca and Oxford product is exactly the largest number of vaccines at 10 million.
This is followed by the product “BNT162b2”, from the US company Pfizer, made in collaboration with the biotechnology company BioNTech, from which the state has agreed to acquire approximately 7.9 million.
There are also 768,000 vaccines for sale at the Chinese Sinovac laboratory, which are called “Coronavac”.
To these three deliveries are also added the 2,169,600 doses that the administration chaired by Luis Abinader agreed with the Fund for Fair Global Access to COVID-19 Vaccines (COVAX), which is promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and managed by the Gavi Vaccine Alliance.
But since COVAX is a vaccine procurement program and not a pharmaceutical company as such, the Dominican Republic could receive different types of vaccines depending on their availability.
Therefore, it is necessary to ask the following: What and in what quantities will be the doses that the country will receive through this mechanism?
According to the latest update of COVAX’s global supply forecast, COVAX has procurement contracts with four different entities: AstraZeneca, Novavax, Serum Institute of India (SII) and Johnson & Johnson, although it is a non-binding agreement with the latter.
It should be noted that the Novavax ‘NVX-CoV2373’ vaccine is in Phase 3 clinical studies, which are the final vaccination test prior to approval.
At this stage, the vaccine is being administered to tens of thousands of healthy volunteers to determine if the vaccine protects them from getting sick, the agency responsible for monitoring the progress of Covid vaccines said.
These studies usually enroll people at highest risk of contracting the disease, and if the vaccine proves to be safe and effective throughout the process, regulatory agencies will review all the evidence and determine whether or not to approve it for widespread use.
Johnson & Johnson has not yet been approved, but has already submitted applications for authorization to the European Union and the United States. According to their studies, it is 66% effective in general and 85% against severe forms, and unlike the others, it requires only one application and not two.
In these cases, the COVAX mechanism will not provide these supplies until they are approved by international health agencies.
However, it is possible that this catalog will be expanded even further as it provides for obtaining from others, indicating that they are negotiating with other private companies and public organizations.
When will they arrive?
While there is no specific date for the arrival of the program’s first vaccines, at least they have announced some sort of delivery schedule.
Currently, the first order of vaccines to be delivered in Dominican territory is approximately 542,400 doses of AstraZeneca, according to a statement from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
That same day, they announced that COVAX had notified health authorities in Latin American countries of the estimated dose allocation for the first stage of vaccine delivery in late January.
This information was received by 36 countries and territories participating in COVAX, including the Dominican Republic, and estimate that the shipped vaccines could be ready from the second half of this month and through the second quarter of 2021.
Contract
The total amount to be paid is $ 22,889,280 (more than 1,300 million pesos) divided into two parts: an initial payment of $ 3,471,360 ($ 201,338,880) and a financial guarantee of $ 19,417,920 (approximately 1,126. $ 239,360). The initial has already been paid because it was necessary to do this before October 9, 2020.
The contract between the country and the Gavi alliance is a committed purchase agreement, one of three options offered by the aforementioned organization, the other two being prepayments and exclusion.
In addition, the government could, to some extent, choose the amount of vaccines they wanted. The parameters between an amount of vaccines to cover 50 and 10 percent of the Dominican population, with the national authorities choosing the latter figure.
For the type of agreement chosen, the government will acquire the amount of doses allocated to the actual price agreed with the manufacturer, with the exception that if the price is less than the total amount paid, the participants will pay less than the financial guarantee. agreed. and they may choose to return the warranty or purchase additional doses if available.
However, if the price is higher than the all-inclusive price, participants only agree to pay the full amount stipulated in the commitment agreement, even if it covers less than the stated population coverage, but they have the option to choose the desired amount to acquire for an additional cost.
KNOWING MORE
Benefit
The benefits of a compromised purchase plan are mainly two.
The first is the relatively low cost of prepayment with less risk of financing, and that the remaining payments are directly related to doses.
There is also the option to decline the purchase of high-cost vaccines when you join the mechanism.
The other types of agreements have a cheap financial guarantee, as well as the ability to decide on certain vaccine candidates to participate in the mechanism.