Iran Launches Final Phase in Human Trial of COVIran Vaccine

Iran on Sunday launched the third and final phase of the clinical trial of its first indigenously-developed coronavirus vaccine at a ceremony in the capital Tehran.

The jab dubbed, COVIranBarakat, was injected to three volunteers that included Dr. Minoo Mohraz, a member of Iran’s coronavirus task force, Hossein Ali Shahriari, the chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s Health Committee, and Ali Akbar Amirzargar, a professor of immunology at Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

COVIran Barakat, is produced by Shifa Pharmed, which has been involved in the large-scale production of antibiotics and penicillin since its founding in 1995. It is part of a pharmaceutical corporation known as Barakat, which is owned by the Headquarters for Executing the Order of Imam.

Mohraz said the jab is estimated to have up to 90% efficiency even against the UK variant of the virus. “I think all together, something over 70%, between 70% and 90%, will be the efficiency of the vaccine,” she told national TV after getting the shot. “We have examined that the vaccine is fully effective on the UK variant, fortunately,” she said.

Twenty-thousand people in the cities of Tehran, Bushehr, Shiraz, Karaj, Mashhad and Isfahan have volunteered to receive the shot in the third stage.

Mass production

Mohammad Mokhber, CEO of the Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam, said they will “certainly deliver one million doses of the vaccine to the Ministry of Health in May”. Mokhber projected that the headquarters will be able to produce 20 to 25 million doses of COVIran Barakat monthly by August. “By the end of the summer, we will deliver 50 million doses of the vaccine to the Iranian nation,” he said.

The COVIran vaccine went into human trial on December 29, 2020, after successfully completing the initial steps, including tests on animals, and obtaining necessary approvals, Press TV wrote. In addition to COVIran, Iran has developed several other vaccines including Razi COV-Pars vaccine developed by the Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute, Fakhra developed by the Iranian Defense Ministry’s research center, and Soberana 2 vaccine which is a joint venture between Cuba’s Finlay Vaccine Institute and Iran’s Pasteur Institute.

In addition to producing domestic vaccines, Iran has imported reliable foreign vaccines from Russia, China, India and Cuba amid the illegal US sanctions that have seriously hampered the country’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this month, Iran received over 700,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as part of its purchase of millions of doses through the COVAX initiative.

COVID casualties

The Iranian Health Ministry announced on Sunday that the daily COVID-19 death toll in the country reached 454 in the past 24 hours, according to Tasnim News Agency. In an address to a press conference on Sunday, the Health Ministry’s spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari put the total death toll at 69,574 since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country in late February 2020. She added the total number of people testing positive for the coronavirus in Iran exceeded 2,396,200 following the detection of 19,165 new cases, saying of the newly detected patients, 3,019 have been hospitalized.

More than 1,877,500 patients have so far either recovered from the disease or been discharged from hospitals across Iran, the spokeswoman noted. Lari regretted that among those currently undergoing treatment in Iranian medical centers, 5,206 COVID-19 patients are in critical condition. She said more than 15.19 million coronavirus diagnostic tests have so far been carried out in Iran and 618,362 people have received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

On Friday, the Health Ministry announced that 301 cities in the country are coded red (very-high risk), while 95 cities are ‎categorized as orange (high-risk) in terms of the coronavirus spread, adding that based on a decision by the National Task Force for Fighting the ‎Coronavirus, travel to and from these cities is prohibited. ‎It put the number of the country’s yellow (medium-risk) and blue (low-risk) cities at 45 and seven, ‎respectively. ‎As per a decision by the anti-coronavirus task force, since April 10, Iranian red and orange cities have entered a partial lockdown to control the fourth wave of COVID-19 infections.

On Saturday, the commander of the Operational Headquarters of the National Task Force for Fighting the Coronavirus, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, banned all direct or indirect passenger travel or goods transportation to or from India until further notice, according to IRNA. In a letter to Iranian Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami, the interior minister added the decision has been made as per the president’s directive and a request by the Health Ministry in view of the record numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the South Asian country.

He called for the immediate implementation of the necessary measures in this regard. On the same day, the secretary of the Operational Headquarters of the anti-coronavirus task force, Babak Dinparast, said Iran has placed a similar ban on flights and travel to and from Pakistan. Speaking to IRNA on Sunday, Kianoush Jahanpour, the head of the Health Ministry’s information center and public relations office, said no case of infection with the Indian coronavirus variant has been detected in Iran. - Iran Daily