David Farcas, Chair of the Covid-19 Vaccine Scientific Advisory Council: “With Chile’s strategy, we will be vaccinated before the US.”

The University of Chile’s Civil Industrial Engineer and MBA of the University of California, Berkeley, participated in a webinar organized by Frontal Trust, where he gave details of what it has meant to evaluate the vaccines against Covid-being developed worldwide 19 and to coordinate phase 3 trials in our country.

On Tuesday, April 06, Frontal Trust, the investment fund manager specialized in alternative assets, held its ninth webinar, entitled “Vaccination Strategy in Chile:  What can we expect?” The meeting was attended by the Chairman of the Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Council, David Farcas, who gave details of the efforts that have been carried out to evaluate the vaccines that are being developed in the world against Covid-19, the criteria that have been used to select the most effective, and what has meant, in terms of time and human resources, to coordinate phase 3 trials in Chile.

After his presentation, Farcas had a conversation with Andrés Echeverría, president of Frontal Trust, and answered questions from the attendees, who were very interested in knowing more about the process, the safety of vaccines and the time that remains to return to normal.

The speaker, recognized in the scientific world for having developed the vaccine against the ISA virus, a finding for which he received the National Prize for Innovation (Avonni) in 2010, said that the vaccines that are coming to Chile, “are extremely safe and effective,” adding that “the influenza vaccine that is broadly used in our country is between 40% and 60% effective,” using the same evaluation criteria, and is considered a very good vaccine.

Regarding the purchase price of vaccines that Chile has purchased, Farcas said that “we have paid a little more than the United States and Europe, but of course, it is not the same to buy 30 million vaccines than 1,100 million.” The executive added that it should be taken into account that “the United States has funded almost all laboratories that are manufacturing vaccines, which has certainly enabled it to negotiate a better price. Depending on the vaccine, we paid between 11% and 30% more, which is very good when compared to Israel, which paid 40% more than we did to get the vaccines sooner.”

One of the biggest questions from the attendants was the speed with which vaccines against Covid-19 have been developed, taking as reference others that have been made in the world. In this regard, Farcas noted that he understood that this was one of the great arguments given by people who do not want to be vaccinated, and clarified that, in general, “the processes of creating vaccines are sequential and in each one different tests are carried out. In the case of the Covid, many prototypes were started at the same time, and tests were done in parallel, so results were achieved in record time. Not because it was done faster, the evaluation criteria were different.”

The presentation took place during just over an hour, where the more than 110 attendees mantained a great deal of interest.