- Russia claims a breakthrough in the global race for a coronavirus vaccine, but experts question how safe and effective it is.
- President Vladimir Putin announced that it had registered the least vaccine in the world after less than two months of testing on less than 100 people.
- But without going into further detail, some experts dismiss the announcement as a “political stunt.”
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Vladimir Putin claims a breakthrough for Russia in the race for a vaccine for a coronavirus, but experts question how safe and effective the vaccine is.
Putin announced last week that Russia had registered the first vaccine in the world for the coronavirus, after less than two months of human testing on less than 100 people.
But whether Russian researchers are actually closer than those in the US than China is unclear, suggesting to some that Russia is bending the rules for the approval of the vaccine.
“My first reaction was that there was probably a lot left over,” Paul Offit, a fax expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Business Insider. “We know nothing about this fax machine other than the fact that Vladimir Putin came on the airwaves and said, ‘This will be safe, this will be effective, it’s all boxes checked.’ And one can only interpret this as a political stunt. . “
That, what’s missing? The most essential step in proving a vaccine is safe, called Phase 3. It is the last phase of human trials, and it usually affects tens of thousands of people.
“Without that Phase 3 data, I’m afraid they’ll use and release a vaccine that could be potentially insecure, potentially just ineffective,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University.
Russia passed laws in April that would allow companies working on fax machines to pass Phase 3 trials. Other countries have also caused or accelerated the process of making faxes. China OK’d a vaccine for military use before publishing the results of Phase 3 studies. And in the United States, companies funded by the Operation Warp Speed program overlap multiple phases of clinical trials.
However, Putin has claimed confidence that he has tested the Russian vaccine – on his own family. The leader said his daughter was one of the test subjects in the experiment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is chairing a video meeting with members of the government at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia, on August 11, 2020.
Sputnik / Aleksey Nikolskyi / Kremlin via REUTERS
There are currently more than 100 vaccines for coronavirus in development worldwide. Researchers around the world are in a race against time, and each other.
But the development of each new vaccine typically takes years, sometimes up to a decade. So far, only a handful of groups have entered Phase 3 in the US and the UK.
Their plans for deployment are currently a little less ambitious than Russia’s. In the United States, the Trump administration has partnered with the private sector to deliver 300 January doses by January 2021. And China has already offered an experimental vaccine to state-owned companies.
The first country to prove it can produce a safe and effective vaccine stands to win billions of dollars in foreign investment. Russia will be marked as Sputnik V – a nod to the world’s first satellite Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, and escalated its 20-year space contest with the US.
As many as 20 countries have already expressed interest, and Sputnik V may be at the forefront of a cold biotech war – something that doctors like Offit fear.
“This pandemic has been an equal opportunity employer,” Offit said. “This virus affects all peoples, all ethnic backgrounds, all religious groups. We must all be brought together in this effort, because we are all in danger. What Putin has done is political theater.”
Russia’s vaccine is being developed at the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow.
But in July, U.S., British and Canadian intelligence services accused Russian hackers of trying to steal fax-related information from investigators abroad, according to The New York Times.
There have also been widespread reports that scientists injected themselves with the prototype and went through other tests to accelerate development.
Peter Hotez, a fax scientist at Baylor University, has been researching vaccines for other coronaviruses for decades, and says the only way peoples can solve a global pandemic is by working together.
“When people talk about this being a race, I say carefully what you want, because history history tells us when you look at the modern history of the American vaccine program, the first vaccines that are normal within a year or so two replaced by better faxes, “he said.
“I think we need to get away from this company, you know, of course, from this nationalism around faxes – call it the American vaccine or the Chinese vaccine or the British vaccine. It does not work that way.”
