MOSCOW – Russia has made no secret of its intention to win the global race for a COVID-19 vaccine, claiming it has a viable and effective vaccine ready to be launched in production in the coming weeks.
But if Russia manages to mark it first with a vaccine, it will be a sign of the country’s appetite for as much as its scientific prowess.
“Russia has traditionally been very strong in faxing,” said Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which funds the fax studies, in an interview with NBC News. “The vaccine we have is actually a kind of copy of an Ebola vaccine that was developed five years ago by the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow.”
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According to Dmitriev, who took part in the early clinical trials of the vaccine, Russia’s vaccine was able to advance because it is a modified version of an earlier vaccine against the virus of the Middle East respiratory syndrome, which first appeared in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and is closely related to COVID-19. The MERS vaccine itself was created using the Ebola virus as its foundation.
Russian Trade Minister Denis Manturov said Monday that vaccine production “should start as soon as September”, with three Russian companies already tapping to treat mass production with “a production volume of several hundred thousand vaccine doses per month with a subsequent increase to early next year. millions. ”
In shooting for such an ambitious scheme, Russia’s vaccine leaps ahead of established pharmaceutical practice. Similar vaccines, such as one being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, are still undergoing so-called phase three clinical trials and are not expected to be widely available until early 2021.
Russia is advancing before completing similar trials, a move Dmitriev says is made possible by the fact that Russia’s fax – despite being similar to Oxford’s – is based on fax technologies already tested in Russia. Both use a so-called adenoviral vector, Dmitriev said. But where Oxford uses a monkey adenovirus, Russia’s vaccine uses a human adenovirus.
Health experts are concerned that such rapid progress comes with inherent risks.
“I hope the Chinese and Russians really test the vaccine before administering it to anyone,” said U.S. disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci about Russia and China’s race to get a vaccine. “Claims of a vaccine ready to be distributed before doing tests, I think, are at least problematic.”
The Russian vaccine, developed in collaboration between the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow and a laboratory of the Russian Ministry of Defense, has completed phase one and two clinical studies with several small groups of volunteers. A larger trial, involving up to 1,600 people, will only begin this month after initial batches of the virus went into circulation.
Russian Public Health Minister Mikhail Murashko told reporters over the weekend that the vaccine had completed its clinical trials and was being prepared for approval by state regulators on probation. The first groups of people to be vaccinated – doctors, teachers and high-risk individuals – will be under some form of observation.
In fact, Russia is conducting its three-phase trial live, treating it more like a demonstrator group than a control group intended to ensure that nothing is dangerous to the larger population. Russia’s pharma industry is preparing for the launch in mass production in September. If all goes well, Murashko said, mass vaccination awaits in October.
“It simply came to our notice then [of our vaccine] “Unlike other faxing platforms, while using technology that has never received regulatory approval, Russia uses technology that has received regulatory approval before,” Dmitriev said, referring to Russia’s work with Ebola and MERS. human adenovirus-based vaccines.
Despite the risks associated with cutting corners when testing a new vaccine, advancing with a seemingly effective candidate may be Russia’s best way out of the coronavirus crisis.
“They are accelerating the approval process for vaccines, but it seems to me that the situation requires it,” said Tom Adshead, director of research at Macro-Advisory, a Moscow-based advisory firm.
Nearly two months after leaving one of the world’s most severe lockdowns, the decline in daily growth of COVID-19 in Russia has slowed to a glacial pace, although Moscow has shown signs in recent weeks seen from a slow increase in cases. Authorities in Moscow have begun strengthening a masked regime that has been widely ignored, but Muscovites have been living without precaution for weeks now.
“If you want an immune population, you either have to expose a lot of people to the virus and let natural selection take the course, or you have to have a vaccine,” Adshead said. “The alternative is a lockdown of Taiwan or New Zealand, which requires much more social cohesion than is available in Russia than most other countries.”
