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Comment by bccdee | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty exciting news. Cuba has a long history of sending medical aid to other developing countries, and right now the vaccine timeline for a lot of poor African countries is really, really bad. If this pans out, it could save a lot of lives.

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> This is pretty exciting news. Cuba has a long history of sending medical aid to other developing countries, and right now the vaccine timeline for a lot of poor African countries is really, really bad. If this pans out, it could save a lot of lives.

Does Cuba have the capacity to produce enough vaccines for those nations? That would be really surpising to me

They'll probably be more likely to share enough technical know how that production elsewhere is possible.

I don't know the answer to that question, but since this is a protein vaccine it should at least be much easier to manufacture at scale.

Cuba is also known to train African doctors and return them back to Africa. They also helped South Africa during the apartheid regime

I have never heard of this. The African National Congress (ANC), which fought against Apartheid for decades, had close ties with communist regimes in Angola and Mozambique. Those countries in turn had Cuban help in the fight against (South Africa-backed) right-wing rebels.

The South African government at the time was rabidly anti-communist -- think Eugene McCarthy and the red scare in the U.S. -- so I doubt they would have much to do with Cuba.

They helped South Africa, not the South African government, which was somewhat famously hostile to the majority of South Africans.

They also attacked French, and South Africans in Angola, btw, fyi

And then the apartheid croaked everywhere south of 17th parallel

That has no relation to vaccine production at all.

It does. Cuba has strong international public health ties and is believed to be setting up production for the vaccine abroad.

It relates in terms of Cuba's attitude to international aid and the possibility of doing something similar with the vaccines.

I'll add another trivia: they also throw you in jail if you speak badly of the current regime, which btw doesn't allow free elections.

I think everyone already knows you go to jail in Cuba and most other authoritarian countries for speaking against the government.

As a cuban I can tell you Cuba definitely doesn't have the means of producing vaccines at scale. They barely have the capacity to keep hospitals clean and sterile. They do have, however, a great history of propaganda.

Vietnam and probably a few other countries, that certainly have the capability, will help in production.

Beyond that, this vaccine is insanely easier to produce than the mRNA vaccines.

this is what i am looking forward to, as an African what do you think we can do to accelerate vaccine access

Ask Cuba to help you set up a factory. The vaccine is not very complicated to produce from available information, and they seem willing to let other countries make it.

You mean they force cubans to work abroad while the dictatorship charges dollars for it, that's some kind of modern slavery.

Ungodly amounts of mis-education in this comment.

Not really, they get sent abroad and a lot of them defect, happened in Venezuelan and other countries. They get paid a misery while the dictatorship gets dollars from their work.

Gusanos lmao

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