Covid-19: Latin America defies nationalism and circumstance to develop its own vaccines

When the pandemic shook the world in 2020, Argentina, like many countries, went into full lockdown. Juliana Cassataro, a researcher at the National University of General San Martín, wondered what her team could do to help. The answer was obvious for a researcher specialising in oral vaccines: make one.“From the beginning we planned to make it as a booster—we realised that we couldn’t compete with developers with millions and millions of dollars and the support of bigger nation states,” says Cassataro. Her team received a small grant of $100 000 from the Argentine ministry of science in May 2020 to design a prototype based on Cassataro’s specialism: recombinant protein vaccines.Confidence was not high. Colleagues and politicians told them to give up—it was not feasible to produce a vaccine “with only a few thousand dollars.”By October 2020, however, Cassataro had produced two formulas with good results in mice, but ran short…
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