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On Saturday, 70 health establishments in Moscow began to carry out the first vaccinations against the coronavirus, as the Russian government had announced in recent days: it is the first mass vaccination campaign launched by Russia against the virus. The vaccine used is Sputnik V, produced in Russia, which in recent months had aroused much perplexity among many experts and analysts, and which has not completed all the clinical tests. For now, coronavirus vaccines are only available to categories considered to be higher risk: doctors and health workers, teachers and social workers, but the Russian government plans to make them available to other categories as soon as possible.
In recent days, thousands of people had signed up to get vaccinated, but it is unclear how many doses of the vaccine Russia can produce. At the moment there is only talk of two million doses by the end of the year, compared to more than 144 million inhabitants.
Russia said it had obtained encouraging results with the Sputnik V vaccine on Wednesday, November 11, just two days after the very promising results of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine were announced. The timing and the fact that the American pharmaceutical company’s vaccine, developed by Germany’s BioNTech, had been declared a higher level of efficacy had caused much perplexity and suggested that the announcement was more propaganda in nature.
Researchers and experts had reported that the results reported by Gamaleja, the National Center for Epidemiological and Microbiological Research in Moscow, were probably correct, although partial and of little relevance at the time of the trial. The general impression was that the Russian government had pushed for a statement quickly after the news about the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine. In addition, in the previous months Russia had tried to greatly promote the results obtained in the investigation against the coronavirus, also adopting controversial solutions and highly criticized by the scientific community.
– Read also: What does not convince the Russian vaccine
Sputnik V plans to administer two doses three weeks apart. Unlike the one from Pfizer and BioNTech based on mRNA sequences (we have explained it here), the Russian vaccine uses two viruses considered not very aggressive (adenovirus), genetically modified to carry the gene that contains the instructions to produce the protein that El The coronavirus takes advantage of it to bind itself to cells, which it will then use as photocopiers to create new copies of itself.
In this way, the immune system learns to recognize the protein of the less aggressive “hybrid” virus and then retains the memory of the threat encountered. In the event of a subsequent coronavirus infection, the immune system will have the knowledge to prevent the virus from binding to cells and thus replicating with the risk of causing COVID-19.
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