How Cuba is pushing ahead with developing its own coronavirus vaccines – and could be nearing “vaccine sovereignty”. And we hear from a researcher about what he learned from asking hundreds of people about the biggest decisions of their lives.


Throughout 2020, the small island nation of Cuba was able to limit the spread of COVID-19 cases and the number of deaths. By early May 2021, just under 700 people had died from the disease – that’s a death rate of around 60 people per million, compared with around 1,750 per million in the US.

While the death rate remains low, case numbers have been increasing in 2021 and there are currently around 1,000 new cases recorded each day.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has hit the Cuban economy hard: its economy shrunk 11% in 2020. Alongside the loss of revenue from tourism – an important source of foreign currency for the island – the strengthening of US sanctions against Cuba’s communist government caused a severe economic crisis, which has led to food shortages. The US sanctions are aimed at pressuring the Cuban government to improve the human rights situation in the country.


When it comes to vaccines, Cuba has decided to go it alone. For this episode, we spoke to three experts to explain how Cuba’s race for a coronavirus vaccine is going – and where it fits into the wider picture of global vaccine diplomacy.


Virologist Amilcar Perez Riverol is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo State in Brazil. He explains that Cuba is working on five candidate vaccines for COVID-19, two of which have moved to phase 3 clinical trials – Soberena O2 and Abdala. These two vaccines are also being rolled out to over 100,000 healthcare workers. Riverol says it’s “a bit unusual” to immunise thousands of people with vaccine candidates for which “you don’t know the efficacy yet”.


Jennifer Hosek, professor of languages, literatures and cultures at Queen’s University, Ontario in Canada, tells us that in Cuba, “trust in the government in regards to healthcare has been built up through many, many decades”.

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