Cuba says Abdullah’s vaccine is 92.28% effective.

(CNN) – On Monday night, Cuban scientists announced a 92.28% efficacy rate for Abdallah, a candidate for the three-dose Covid-19 vaccine, which they see as proof of the island’s unconventional strategy to produce its own vaccines, rather than trying to import them.

despite of Abdullah and another Cuban vaccine, Sopirana-02, which has been run on a large scale on the communist island in expanded trials, the government will need to apply for emergency use approval and start submitting data to the World Health Organization for the vaccine’s eventual use abroad.

On Saturday, Cuban scientists said that the candidate vaccine Sovereign-02 was 62% effective after two injections and that they were still studying its effectiveness after the third injection.

At the beginning of the epidemic, Cuba, which has long produced many of its own medicines, announced that the island would not import vaccines from abroad, saying that it could not compete with other countries for medicines.

Instead, the island has focused on developing its own vaccines, which they said could eventually be manufactured in other countries or marketed to visiting tourists as part of “vaccination holidays.”

Cuba was the first country in Latin America to produce two indigenous vaccines that reached phase III trials.

However, the impact of the coronavirus has devastated the island’s economy, and Cuban health officials on Monday announced 1,561 new daily cases, the highest daily increase since the pandemic began.

To date, Cuba has reported a total of 169,365 cases of coronavirus and 1,170 deaths from the coronavirus.