As the global coronavirus tally crossed 20 million of Tuesday, reports came from Russia of a new Covid-19 vaccine approved by the Vladimir Putin government.
With this, Russia became the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine for use among tens of thousands of its citizens.
The race for a vaccine is heating up as nations across the globe brace for new outbreaks of the disease even while they try to restart economies battered by months of initial lockdowns to curb the spread.
While the news of a vaccine finally being discovered for the pandemic seems like good news, but the speed at which Russia has moved has worried some scientists who fear Moscow may be putting national prestige before safety.
HERE IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT RUSSIA’S COVID VACCINE:
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday announced that his government had granted regulatory approval to a Covid-19 vaccine after less than two months of human testing.
Russia has named its Covid-19 vaccine ‘Sputnik V’ for foreign markets, a reference to the world’s first satellite and what Moscow sees as its success at becoming the first country to approve a vaccine.
Putin said that one of his two adult daughters had already been inoculated with the cleared vaccine, which he described as effective. “She’s feeling well and has a high number of antibodies,” he said.
The vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow uses a different virus — adenovirus — that’s been modified to carry genes for the “spike” protein that coats the coronavirus, as a way to prime the body to recognise when a real COVID-19 infection comes along. That’s similar to vaccines being developed by China’s CanSino Biologics and Britain’s Oxford University and AstraZeneca.
The vaccine is being developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute in coordination with Moscow’s defence ministry. Clinical trials of the vaccine began on June 18 and included 38 volunteers. All of the participants developed an immunity. The first group was discharged on July 15 and the second group on July 20.
The vaccine still has to complete final trials, raising concerns among some experts at the speed of its approval, but the Russian business conglomerate Sistema has said it expects to put it into mass production by the end of the year.
Kirill Dmitriev, head of the country’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund, said Russia had already received requests from more than 20 countries for 1 billion doses of its newly-registered Covid-19 vaccine. According to officials, large-scale production of the vaccine will start in September, and mass vaccination may begin as early as October.
However, the vaccine’s approval by Russia’s health ministry comes before the start of a larger trial involving thousands of participants, commonly known as a Phase III trial. Usually, regulatory approvals for public use of a vaccine are granted only after successful completion of Phase III trials.
Advanced clinical trials for the Russian vaccine are set to start Wednesday. The trials study will span several countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and possibly Brazil, and involve several thousand people. In the meantime, the vaccine will be offered to tens of thousands of people who volunteer to be vaccinated. Russian authorities have said that medical workers, teachers and other risk groups will be the first to undergo vaccination.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and Russian health authorities are discussing the process for possible WHO prequalification for its newly approved Covid-19 vaccine, a WHO spokesman said on Tuesday. WHO had earlier said all vaccine candidates should go through full stages of testing before being rolled out.
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