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Russia licensed the vaccine developed by the Institute of Vectors in Siberia after scientists completed an early-stage human trial last month.
Russia’s second Covid-19 vaccine, called EpiVacCorona, has been approved, President Putin announced at today’s online government meeting, congratulating scientists. He added that Russia’s third Covid-19 vaccine, developed by the Chumakov Center, will also be licensed in the near future.
“We need to increase the production of vaccines first and second. We will continue to work with foreign partners and promote vaccines abroad,” he said.
The Vector Institute’s EpiVacCorona Vaccine. Image: Sputnik.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova and the head of the Russian consumer safety regulator Anna Popova injected EpiVacCorona during clinical trials, Putin said. Golikova said the new vaccine has fewer side effects and 40,000 volunteers in Russia will participate in the vaccine trial. The first 60,000 doses of EpiVacCorona will be produced in the “near future”.
The Vector Institute completed a phase one clinical trial with the EpiVacCorona vaccine last month, involving 100 volunteers, ages 18 to 60. All of the volunteers felt fine, no one had serious side effects, and only a few had short-term pain, about 1-2 days, at the injection site.
The Vector Institute has the full name of the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology, which used to be the Soviet biological weapons research laboratory. It is one of only two places in the world that is home to smallpox virus, along with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Vector Institute also houses Ebola samples.
In August, Sputnik V, developed by the Gameleya Institute in collaboration with the Russian Ministry of Defense, became the first vaccine in the world approved by the government, although the third phase of the test has not been completed, a step of important test above. scale of thousands of people. Many Western countries fear that Russia has “burned the stage”, while Moscow said skepticism of the vaccine is unfounded.
About 400 high-risk people have been injected with Sputnik V, the Health Ministry said, but the vaccine has not yet been widely distributed. Russia says dozens of countries have expressed concern about its vaccines.
Covid-19 appeared in 214 countries and territories, infected more than 38.4 million people, more than a million people died, and almost 29 million recovered. Russia is the fourth largest epidemic area in the world with more than 1.3 million people infected and more than 23,000 deaths.
Phuong Vu (Follow Reuters / Sputnik)
