This week, newspaper Sol reported the collaboration between the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and Russian specialists for the joint production of a vaccine against covid-19. This collaboration is related to clinical trials in order to combine the English vaccine with Sputnik V.

Professor Miguel Castanho refers to it as “great news”. "Two rivals and competitors have come together to create a better product that benefits everyone".

In Miguel Castanho's opinion, this “mixed vaccine” may be viable, since both have “the same mode of action: a harmless virus that distributes a protein gene from SaRS-CoV-2 to genes in cells to produce the protein and therefore, trigger the immune response”.

Both vaccines, from the English pharmaceutical company and from Russia, are the ones that raise most doubts and reservations in the scientific community. When joining efforts to create a joint project, there must be “transparency in their tests and the results should always be published and made available for scrutiny, because this is an essential condition in any circumstance”, says Miguel Castanho.

In this article in Sol, there is also reference to the Australian CSL, which suspended the testing phase of its vaccine "after an indeterminate number of participants in the first phase of testing had tested 'false positives' for HIV". After these results, there was a change in the strategy presented by the Australian government which, according to Professor Miguel Castanho, is to be commended. "In view of the inevitable postponement that would represent optimizing the vaccine, given the number of vaccines that are already expected to be approved, they gave up on developing their own vaccine".

Read this article in Sol here