No Cuban child died of COVID-19 after vaccination campaign
Before the vaccination campaign in children started, 18 infants between the ages of two and 18 years old had unfortunately lost their lives to COVID-19. No child died of this terrible disease in Cuba after the vaccination campaign in this population group began.
Author: Leticia Martínez | informacion@granma.cu
july 20, 2022 10:07:07
Photo: Ismael Batista
Before the vaccination campaign in children started, 18 infants between the ages of two and 18 years old had unfortunately lost their lives to COVID-19. No child died of this terrible disease in Cuba after the vaccination campaign in this population group began. This is the most relevant result of the Cuban vaccine Soberana, an immunogen of the Finlay Vaccine Institute.
Precisely, the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine presented the closing of the evaluation of the effectiveness and impact of the pediatric vaccination against COVID-19 in the country during the Tuesday meeting with the President of the Republic.
According to IPK doctor, María Eugenia Toledo Romaní, Soberana’s main researcher, it was determined after a rigorous study that the effectiveness of the vaccine in the prevention of the symptomatic disease COVID-19 in children from two to five years old was 90.1 % during the Omicron wave in Cuba.
Meanwhile, the effectiveness of vaccination with Soberana in the prevention of severe COVID-19 disease in children aged two to 18 years was 95.8%.
This mean that there were more than 63,600 less cases, said the IPK specialist. This also means that more than 63,000 children and young people were prevented from transmitting the disease, which undoubtedly contributed to the control of the coronavirus epidemic in the country, said Vicente Vérez Bencomo, director of the IFV.
On this highly sensitive issue for the Cuban family, the President of the Republic considered the campaign was also decisive for the restart of the school year and, therefore, to resume normality in the lives of children. The vaccination has made possible the normal course and lack of complications in schools, said the Head of State.
In this meeting with the experts form the Ministry of Health (MINSAP), Vérez Bencomo detailed to the country’s leadership the technological transfer of the production of Soberana vaccine to the Pasteur Institute of Iran, a scientific process equally successful in those distant lands.