Tribune News Service
New Delhi, September 7
Clinical trials for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine will take place in India this month, the head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill Dmitriev, told a news agency in an interview addressing questions about whether Moscow had stolen the vaccine and if Sputnik. V had been tested with very few people compared to its Western competitors.
In addition to India, clinical trials will also start this month in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines and Brazil and the preliminary results of this phase (Phase 3) will be published in October-November, Dmitriev said.
When asked if there were too few participants in the Sputnik V Phase 1-2 tests, he said that most of the media did not understand a crucial point. On the surface, the Sputnik V test appeared smaller than AstraZeneca’s. But AstraZeneca initially ran its test with a one-time model. He tested the two-shot model on just 10 people, while the Sputnik V trial topped that number four times, he reasoned.
The executive director of RDIF denied that Russia had stolen the vaccine and claimed that the Gamaleya Center had modified an existing platform developed in 2015 for Ebola fever, which went through all phases of clinical trials and was used successfully in Africa in 2017.
Dimitriev, a familiar face in India, said his competitors were working on technologies like mRNA that have yet to be tested for safety and efficacy. While the Sputnik V clinical trials showed no serious adverse effects, the incidence of serious adverse effects for other vaccine candidates ranged from 1 to 25 percent.
Meanwhile, the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), of which India is a member, joined the EU and Germany (as regional coordinators of the European group), Singapore (as regional coordinator of the ASEAN group) and Russia (as the coordinator Northeast and South Asia regional group) to issue a joint statement. He reiterated the need for international cooperation and support to maintain flexible, open and connected supply chains, as well as underscoring the need to cooperate in the post-Covid phase.
