Cuba banking on homemade vaccine, promises 100 million doses

In Brazil, it is common for anyone even slightly to the left of Jair Bolsonaro to be told to “go to Cuba” by the president’s most vociferous supporters. The flawed rationale behind the ‘insult’ is that the far-right sees the socialist island as a miserable hellhole, and that anyone who disagrees with Mr. Bolsonaro must be a card-carrying communist.

But since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, some of the president’s opponents might just heed this advice, as Cuba has handled the Covid-19 crisis better than almost all of its neighbors and is now close to producing its own homemade vaccine.

The Soberana 02 vaccine began advanced phase-two clinical trials on January 20, testing its safety on a sample population of around 900 volunteers, aged between 19 and 90. Having overtaken Cuba’s original vaccine candidate (Soberana 01), it is now the only Latin American-made immunizer to...