this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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The Cubans were also dealing with Covid that year.
Fun fact: Cuba developed 5 vaccines while the US was still doing covid denialism! https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/01/1056952488/a-small-island-nation-has-cooked-up-not-1-not-2-but-5-covid-vaccines-its-cuba
Liberalism truly is a cancer, something that Cuba also has a vaccine used to treat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CimaVax-EGF
Truth: I clicked that expecting to read about a Cuban vaccine for liberalism (mostly wondering how that worked)
I really admire what Cuba has done in the last half century. They're a fairly resource poor island nation who were cut off suddenly from the trading partner who accounted for 85% of their trade. While they're constantly struggling financially, they have a huge rate of tertiary education, better female participation in the professional workforce than almost all nations, a decent happiness score and a now a better life expectancy than the richest nation in the world.
However, the creation of COVID vaccines was not difficult. COVID is not that dissimilar to a number of existing viruses which we already have vaccines for. The production of a simple vaccine is easy, but rounds of testing and approval take a long time. This is how come Cuba could create vaccines based on existing techniques with slight tweeks.
Looking at the shitfest around the vaccines in the west i would say otherwise, including how they refuse to release the patents.
mRNA vaccines are difficult and expensive to make. Other technologies are cheaper.
The ones you had to wait for in the west were mRNA vaccines. They are newer, more complicated, and in theory customisable to a wider range of infections. While I'd love to see these opened up and used for their full potential I can see why the pharma corps don't want that.
While I haven't looked, I'll bet that the Cuban ones were"simply" using a deactivated virus - which is less effective and especially less effective against mutated strains.
But they didn't have people preferring to take horse dewormer, saying it didn't exist, or trying to drink bleach instead of taking the vaccine.
You may have just hit on part of the reason why Americans can now expect to live three years less than Cubans.