Latin American countries not only developed their own covid vaccine prototypes but also rolled them out. Martín De Ambrosio reports on a region taking its first steps towards vaccine security
When the pandemic shook the world in 2020, Argentina, like many countries, went into full lockdown. Juliana Cassataro, a researcher at the National University of General San Martín, wondered what her team could do to help. The answer was obvious for a researcher specialising in oral vaccines: make one.
“From the beginning we planned to make it as a booster we realised that we couldn’t compete with developers with millions and millions of dollars and the support of bigger nation states,” says Cassataro. Her team received a small grant of $100 000 from the Argentine ministry of science in May 2020 to design a prototype based on Cassataro’s specialism: recombinant protein vaccines.
Confidence was not high. Colleagues and politicians told them to give up it was not feasible to produce a