MOSCOW (AP) – Russian scientists say the country’s Sputnik V vaccine looks safe and effective against COVID-19, according to early results from an advanced study Published in a British medical journal on Tuesday.
The news is a boost for the vaccine, which governments around the world are increasingly buying in the race to stop the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Researchers say that the vaccine, based on a drop test involving about 20,000 people in Russia, is about 91% effective and prevents vaccinated individuals from becoming seriously ill with COVID-19. But it is unclear whether Sputnik V can stop the transfer. The study was published online Tuesday in The Lancet.
Scientists unrelated to the research acknowledged that the speed with which the vaccine was manufactured and rolled out had drawn criticism from the Russian effort due to an “improper haste, cutting corners and the absence of transparency.”
“But the outcome reported here is clear,” British scientists Ian Jones and Polly Roy wrote in an accompanying commentary. “Another vaccine may now be involved in the fight to reduce the incidence of COVID-19.”
The vaccine was approved by the Russian government on August 11. President Vladimir Putin personally announced the news on national television, saying one of his daughters had already received it. At the time, the vaccine had only been tested on several dozen people, and the move drew criticism from experts at home and abroad.
Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund that generated the development of the survey, called the study in The Lancet “check and mate to the critics of the Russian vaccine.”
“Russia has been right from the start,” he said.
Outside Russia, according to the fund, Sputnik V has been authorized in more than a dozen countries – including the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Armenia and Turkmenistan; Latin American countries, including Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela; African countries such as Algeria as well as Serbia, Iran, Palestine and the UAE.
The vaccine has already been supplied to six countries. In total, more than 50 countries have submitted applications for 2.4 billion doses, an RDIF spokesman told The Associated Press.
The latest study is based on research in which about 20,000 people over the age of 18 were at 25 hospitals in Moscow between September and November, of whom three-quarters received two doses of Russian vaccine 21 days apart and the rest received placebo shots.
Serious side effects have been reported rarely in both groups and four deaths have been reported, although none have been reported as a result of the vaccine.
The study included more than 2,100 people over the age of 60, and the vaccine was apparently about 92% effective. The research continues, but the Russian Ministry of Health said in December that the study reduced the size of the planned 40,000 subjects to about 31,000 already enrolled volunteers, with developers citing ethical concerns about the use of placebo surveys.
The Russian vaccine uses an adapted version of the cold that causes adenovirus to carry genes for the ear protein in the coronavirus, to make the body react when COVID-19 comes together. It is a similar technology to the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. But unlike the AstraZeneca dual-dose vaccine, the Russians use a slightly different adenovirus for the second shot.
“It aims to drive higher immune responses to the target ‘peak’ by using two slightly different points,” said Alexander Edwards, an associate professor of biomedical technology at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not involved in the Russian research. not. He said if you have two identical shots, it is possible that the immune system does not get such a big boost because of the second injection.
Roy, a professor of virology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said there should be no more doubt about the Russian vaccine. She says the high level of antibodies produced by Sputnik V suggests that it may also protect against some of the new COVID-19 variants recently detected, but more studies are needed to verify this.
“Initially I was worried about what they said and thought they were getting too much publicity, but the data is very strong now,” Roy said.
Sputnik V was rolled out in a large-scale vaccination campaign in Russia in December, with doctors and teachers first in line. Last month, Putin ordered mass vaccinations to begin.
In early January, the Russian Direct Investment Fund said more than 1 million Russians had already been vaccinated. Some Russian media have questioned the number, suggesting that the rollout was much slower, and many Russian regions reported a small number of vaccinations.
The production of Sputnik V will cover various countries, including India, South Korea, Brazil, China. “We will also be producing vaccines in Kazakhstan, developing (production) in Belarus, Turkey and possibly even in Iran,” Dmitriev said, adding that production in China will begin at the end of the month.
Kamel Mansouri, head of Algeria’s national agency for pharmaceutical products, started producing the Sputnik V vaccine in Algeria on Tuesday. The first group of 50,000 doses arrived in Algeria last week.
The European Medicines Agency has said that the developers of Sputnik V recently sought advice on the details they need to submit for the vaccine to be licensed in the European Union with 27 countries.
Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto arrived on Hungary’s first consignment of Sputnik V – 40,000 doses – on Tuesday, the foreign minister said on Facebook. Hungary expects to receive enough Sputnik V vaccine to treat 1 million people in the next three months.
Hungarian health authorities were the first in the EU to approve the vaccine on January 21, but the National Public Health Center still has to give its final approval before shots are distributed to the public.
The minister took the opportunity to explode the explosion of the EU’s own vaccination, which was much slower than that in Israel, Britain or the United States.
“The centralized vaccine procurement in Brussels was a failure that endangered the lives of Europeans and quickly restarted the European economy,” Szijjarto said.
“We were the first, but we will probably not be the only ones” in the EU to use Russian and Chinese COVID-19 vaccines, he added.
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Maria Cheng reports from Toronto. Associated Press authors Aomar Ouali in Algiers, Algeria, Lori Hinnant in Paris and Justin Spike in Budapest, Hungary, contributed.
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