A small island nation has cooked up not 1, not 2 but 5 COVID vaccines. It's Cuba!
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, Cuba decided it was going to make its own vaccine – even though vaccine development historically takes years, even decades, to bear fruit.
Why did the Communist island nation decide to go it alone?
It didn't want to rely on the whims of foreign governments or international pharmaceutical companies to immunize its people. Cuba didn't even sign up for the COVAX program, backed by the World Health Organization, that was promising to purchase vaccines in bulk and distribute them equitably around the globe.
Cuba was taking a gamble that it could develop a vaccine before the coronavirus swept across on the island.
"I don't like the word 'gamble'," says Cuban virologist Amilcar Pérez Riverol about his nation's strategy. "I prefer the word 'risky'."
Pérez Riverol left Cuba in 2013 and now works as researcher at at São Paulo State University in Brazil. But he writes regularly about the COVID situation in Cuba on his page and elsewhere. He used to work in the labs in Havana that were tasked with developing Cuba's home-grown vaccines.
