Covid: is it possible to produce vaccines in Italy? What are the existing problems and to be overcome? This is the substantial topic that will be presented next Thursday on the table of the Mise (ministry of economic development) where there will be a meeting between the minister Giancarlo Giorgetti and the president of Farmindustria Massimo Scaccabarozzi.
Explaining the complexity of the vaccine production process will be one of the key steps in the intervention of the President of Farmindustria. Meanwhile, according to data released by the Ministry of Health, today they are registered 13.314 new positive cases (yesterday 9.630). The new deaths are 356 (yesterday 274); the discharged healed today are 12.898 (yesterday 10.335). Overall, the positive cases are 387.948 (yesterday 387.903).
Producing vaccines in Italy is an almost possible mission
"We will take stock of the situation on the possibilities of lending a hand ”- said Scaccabarozzi -“ we will tell the minister how a vaccine is produced and what the times are. A vaccine is a live product, not a synthetic one, it must be treated in a particular way. It must have a bioreaction inside a machine called a bioreactor. 4-6 months pass from when a production is started ". In fact, the crux of production is precisely the bioreactors. He also pointed this out Rino Rappuoli, father of many new generation vaccines, coordinator of research on monoclonal antibodies of Tuscany Life Sciences and scientific director of Gsk.
To produce anti-Covid vaccines in Italy, “we need to know what we want to produce. There are two phases - he explained - the first concerns the production of the substance, the vaccine itself. That is, I produce theRNA, or protein, depending on the vaccines. To do this, bioreactors are needed but in Italy there are no plants ". And he clarified, “only Gsk it has them, but not for the Covid vaccine, but for the one against meningitis which is bacterial. Reithera it has it but I don't think to make millions of doses. The second phase concerns the filling and in Italy many companies are able to do it ".
In Italy so far more than 3,5 million people have been vaccinated
“If we were to think, for example, of adapting Gsk's bioreactors for the production of anti-Covid vaccines, we would not be able to imagine an operation in a short time. Among other things, this would mean stopping the production of the meningitis vaccine ”. All this, however, does not mean that we cannot think of setting up plants with bioreactors in Italy. "However, we must take into account that standard and approval are needed beforeEma and then ofAIFA - Rappuoli further specified - and the times would not be short ”. "But there could be another way: the transfer to Italy of the technology already developed by Pfizer or Astrazeneca for example, and in this case it would take from 7-8 months, maximum one year.
While starting from scratch with the plants, it would take 2 years to get to production ". Meanwhile, the daily update on the number of vaccines administered in Italy records that the inoculated doses have exceeded 3,5 million. Of the more than 3,5 million doses administered, 2.210.876 went to health and social health personnel, 638.483 to non-health personnel. And, again, 367.054 to guests of the RSA, 261.444 to over 80, 24.902 to members of the armed forces, 35.216 to school staff. Most of the doses used, according to data from the Ministry of Health, are of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine (3.334.254), then Astrazeneca (110.016) and Moderna (93.705).
Too big interests prevent it