Fernando Polack is a pediatrician and infectologist and directs the Infant Foundation. From there he has specialized for more than two decades in the study of respiratory system diseases. He knows it like no one else and, during this pandemic, he played a very prominent role in the public space. He is one of the main national referents and will lead the local tests of the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.
-Today you met with Alberto Fernández, what did you talk about?
-The president has been talking to us about this issue for a long time and supported us from the beginning. We noticed that he was as happy about this news as we were. Alberto Fernández, but also Ginés and his team have been following our conversations with the laboratories closely. They gave us a hand in everything we needed and they talked to us so that Argentina would be in this race in which it will participate from now on. And this, obviously, is only the beginning of the work. Now we have to concentrate on working without pause to have the answers in time.
-Why is this good news for Argentina?
-Traditionally, countries that have the privilege of participating in trials of this nature open the door to receiving priority vaccine shipments, and that is the desire of all of us who participate in trials. It should not be forgotten that no company will have the initial capacity to produce vaccines to protect the entire population and not even the initial capacity to cover any of the participating countries in their entirety. This is why the World Health Organization has developed guidelines to prioritize the groups to be vaccinated.
-Why did you, from the Infant Foundation, make the link? Have you been working with both international laboratories for a long time?
-This is a decision that Pfizer made because it has known how we work and how we think about respiratory diseases for years. Our group is a central player in the protection against other respiratory germs and, in fact, we are not new in this field. This is a project that every country would like to join, but there are many criteria that come into play when a decision of this magnitude is made.
-What do you mean?
-The experience of the principal investigator and his team, the knowledge of the disease, the logistic capacity to perform complex studies, the harmony with the host institutions both at hospital and national level and, finally, the epidemiology of the disease. It is clear that Argentina is not the only nation with coronavirus, but evidently the conjunction of these aspects culminated in putting us at the top of the preferences this time.
-There are many kinds of vaccines, what is the main advantage of testing one that uses the messenger RNA technique?
-It has a number of advantages in theory but will certainly have to be tested in practice. A priori, scaling up production in the future should be simpler: it is much easier to make an RNA band-aid than a protein. We hope it can be done. We are hopeful but we have to be cautious.
By Pablo Esteban-Page 12
Link to the complete article:
https://www.pagina12.com.ar/277806-fernando-polack-nos-eligieron-porque-saben-como-trabajamos
