Five months after the pandemic, Russia’s first Covid-19 vaccine is in its final stages of development, already proven safe. Decades of research, without spying on foreign knowledge, led to the advance, a senior scientist told RT.
Like their colleagues in other leading nations of the world, Russian scientists have traveled a bumpy road from the discovery of the coronavirus to the development of a promising vaccine in record time.
This month, the famous Moscow Sechenov University announced that the first phase of clinical trials for a vaccine had been successful. About 38 volunteers who participated in human trials have been released with few or no reported side effects.
The researchers will now move forward, testing the efficacy of the vaccine and preparing it for registration with the Ministry of Health. Other prototypes will follow, some nearing completion of phase one trials, which generally demonstrate the safety of the new vaccine for use in humans.
It is easy enough to understand why Russia is so interested in receiving a Covid-19 vaccine. Having reported more than 811,000 cases and 13,249 deaths, it is among the five countries most affected by the epidemic. But how did she make a vaccine so fast, given that the coronavirus, or its deadly crown-shaped strain of SARS-CoV-2, was not known to scientists before 2020?
‘Nothing can be done from scratch’
Russia has more than 20 years of experience in developing technology for vaccine production. This helped create the only Covid-19 vaccine in a very short period of time according to normal drug development standards, Vadim Tarasov, director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Biotechnology at Sechenov University, told RT Arabic in a comprehensive interview. .
“Nothing can be done from scratch” He explained. Virologists at the Sechenov Institute and the Gamalei Institute for Epidemiology and Microbiology, another coronavirus research center in Moscow, benefited from that. “huge order book” to decode the genome and structure of Covid-19 and quickly create a prototype vaccine.
With a technological platform and an understanding of what the virus transmits, you can design a vaccine against almost any disease. The only question is how effective will it be.
The technology behind the Russian vaccine in question is based on adenovirus, the common cold. Artificially created, the vaccine’s proteins replicate those of Covid-19 and trigger “An immune response similar to that caused by the coronavirus itself” Tarasov revealed.
In other words, getting vaccinated is slightly similar to having survived the coronavirus, but without its life-threatening risks. The vaccine, of course, will not be a magic wand that will prevent everyone from getting sick. It may not stop the full spread of the coronavirus, but it will make symptoms much milder.
Tarasov said that the 38 volunteers received the tested vaccine as a standard injection into the shoulder. “A standard procedure, not very painful, that many people go through, therefore, there is nothing terrible here and nothing fundamentally new.”
Russia can claim a breakthrough, but is not in profit from it
The vaccine, tested on volunteers ages 18 to 60, has shown good results “in terms of tolerance,” Tarasov revealed. Therefore, phase one trials “have clearly shown that this vaccine is safe and can be used.” For the scientist, this was a great leap in his enormous scientific effort.
We can truly speak of a breakthrough as our country has proven to be one of the leaders in the global pharmaceutical industry due to the fact that it has retained and developed new competencies in drug development.
Russian researchers have moved on to phase two trials, which will evaluate the efficacy and dosage of the vaccine. Other nations using the same technology are also making progress, with the UK, China, Japan, and the US like the other prominent leaders.
While their respective health officials insist that preventive cure will become a common public good, there is room for ambition and prestige in the undeclared race to present the world’s first coronavirus vaccine.
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Challenged to give his opinion on this, Tarasov replied: “The key question here is who will be the first to help their own citizens and those who need it, because the sooner we get a vaccine, a good and efficient one that can be applied at the required scale, and we are talking about on a large scale: the faster we can overcome the coronavirus. “
He insisted that the reason behind vaccine production first is purely humanistic, not political. “Perhaps it is not entirely correct to ask the question of satisfying political ambitions or [striving] to be the first It is important to help people and prevent the spread of the pandemic,“concluded the scientist.
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