Vladimir Putin says Russia has made a breakthrough in the race for a coronavirus vaccine, but improves the vaccine’s protection and effectiveness.
Putin announced last week that Russia had registered the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, after less than two months of testing on fewer than a hundred people.
But it’s unclear whether Russian researchers are closer than those in the United States or China, suggesting to some that Russia has circumvented regulations to approve the vaccine.
“My first reaction was that it was probably much ado about nothing,” Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Business Insider. “We don’t know anything about this vaccine, other than the fact that Vladimir Putin went on the airwaves and said, ‘It’s going to be safe, it’s going to be effective, it’s met all the requirements. ‘”And this can only be interpreted as a political coup. “
So what’s missing? The maximum essential step to demonstrate that a vaccine is safe is called phase 3. This is the last phase of human trials and reaches tens of thousands of people.
“Without this Phase 3 data, I’m very concerned that they could use and release a vaccine that could be potentially dangerous or even just ineffective,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University.
Russia passed legislation in April that would allow companies using vaccines to pass phase 3 trials. Other countries have also replaced or accelerated the vaccine production process. China approved a vaccine for military use before publishing the results of the phase 3 trial. And in the United States, corporations funded through the Operation Warp Speed program are overlapping stages of clinical trials.
However, Putin, with a bit of luck, claimed to have tried the Russian vaccine. . . in his own family. The executive said his daughter was one of the control subjects of the experiment.
Lately, there are more than a hundred coronavirus vaccines in development around the world. Researchers around the world are in a race against time and each other.
But developing a new vaccine takes years, up to a decade. So far, only a handful of teams in the United States and United Kingdom have entered Phase 3.
Its deployment plans are, for the moment, a little less ambitious than Russia’s. In the United States, the Trump administration has partnered with the personal sector to deliver three hundred million doses by January 2021. And China has already presented an experimental vaccine to workers at state-owned companies.
The first country to prove it can produce an effective vaccine could win billions of dollars in foreign investment. The Russian satellite will be announced as Sputnik V, a nod to the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, introduced through the Soviet Union in 1957, intensifying the 20-year regional race with the United States.
Up to 20 countries have already expressed interest, putting Sputnik V at the forefront of a biotech Cold War, something doctors like Offit fear.
“This pandemic has been an equivalent opportunity for employers,” Offit said. “This virus affects all nations, all ethnic backgrounds, all devout groups. We will all have to be united in this effort because we are all at risk. What Putin has done is political theater. “
The Russian 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 borrow vaccine-related data from researchers abroad, according to the New York Times.
There have also been reports of scientists injecting themselves with the prototype and rushing to additional testing to speed up development.
Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor University, has studied vaccines against other coronaviruses for decades and says the way nations solve a global pandemic is by cooperating.
“When people talk about race, I tell them to be careful what they want, because history tells us that when you look at the modern history of the U. S. vaccination program, they are not very important. “In the U. S. , the first vaccines distributed are replaced in a short time. one or two years with more vaccines,” he said.
“I think we want to get away from this business, of course, you know, this nationalism around vaccines, calling them the American vaccine, the Chinese vaccine or the British vaccine. It doesn’t look like that. “
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