Russia is working on a COVID-19 vaccine, and it has a serious space-y name: Sputnik V.
The country announced on Tuesday (August 11) that its first vaccine for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has received permission for regulation for foreign markets, according to Reuters. And in a nod to the space war of the Cold War of the last century, they named the fax machine Sputnik V after the world’s first satellite Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The name means the country’s success in being the first to receive a vaccine, according to a Russian government official, Reuters reported.
However, the vaccine has received some question from scientists around the world, as the vaccine was approved after less than two months of human testing.
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Less than two months of human testing is “about enough time to take the first steps, a Phase I trial that gives you some idea of immune response over more than one dose,” chemist Derek Lowe stated in an advisory piece, published in “In the Pipeline,” an independent blog of the publishers of the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“It’s just not enough time to do a reasonable efficiency workup as well, and absolutely not enough time to get any kind of reading about safety. “
Russia is not the only world power to draw on outer space for inspiration in appointing COVID-19 treatments. In the United States, the Trump administration launched an initiative called “Operation Warp Speed.” In science fiction such as “Star Trek”, humans travel in spaceships at “warp speed”, as an extremely high speed not possible with existing technology.
Operation Warp Speed’s initiative aims to deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine by January 2021. In April, the US Department of Health and Human Services proposed up to $ 483 billion under Operation Warp Speed To support fax development.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
