MOSCOW – The Russian edition of the US vaccine allocation Operation Warp Speed is far from the Kremlin, on a quiet street on the outskirts of Moscow.
Located in a sand brick construction with a workplace that pronounces medical examinations and a filthy wooden door, it doesn’t look like a medical lab. But this is where, if you think President Vladimir Putin, Russia won the world race to expand an opposed vaccine. COVID-19.
Praising the developers of gamaleya’s national center for epidemiology and microbiology, Putin said in August that Russia had registered a vaccine for public use, making it the first vaccine in the world to download such authorization. Soviet-era satellite that triggered the race through the area in 1957, a transparent sign of Putin’s geopolitical importance to the project.
The president’s announcement on live television ignored a key point: Russia passed the vaccine after testing on fewer than 80 people, and larger trials are needed to assess protection and efficacy. in the West, where shots must be tested on tens of thousands of subjects before erasing them.
The vaccine will be able to be widely distributed until the end of this year or early next year, authorities said. This is the same schedule as the vaccines of rivals in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. phase studies will not be available until November, and full knowledge is expected next year.
“Overall, I would say that Russia is a bit of the leading Western candidates,” said Rasmus Bech Hansen, CEO of Airfinity Ltd. , a London-based company that tracks vaccine and drug development. COVID-19, “but not farArray”
Putin’s announcement in August has already produced a key result for the Kremlin: it has put Russia’s vaccination efforts in the past under the radar, causing a wave of demands from governments around the world to buy or produce the vaccine. the head of the state fund supporting the allocation said he had obtained orders of 1. 2 billion doses.
“We conducted a survey in 12 key countries and the popularity of Sputnik’s call is 80%,” Kirill Dmitriev, director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, said in an interview. “But it’s not public relations. We are looking to save Says that Sputnik is 3 to 4 months ahead of its rivals.
With the fourth number of cases in the world, but with a large decrease in line with the health expenditure of the maximum of Western countries, Russia wants a vaccine. Faced with an increase in cases, Moscow has joined other European capitals in tightening restrictions. a dozen more candidates.
For years, Putin has driven the reconstruction of Russia’s long-neglected life sciences prowess, arguing that good fortune may one day be the world’s winners and losers. With a weak presence in global pharmaceutical innovation, the Kremlin has used vaccines as comfortable strength equipment. to gain influence in emerging countries.
The name of a mythical Soviet microbiologist, Gamaleya was the largest Russian manufacturer of a TB vaccine. In 2015, Putin welcomed the progression of an Ebola attack. Approximately 2,000 other people won in Guinea in 2017-18, according to Gamaleya’s website. outbreak in the Democratic Republic of congo, new Merck vaccines
However, Gamaleya had hurt through hearing that he mattered at home. The Ebola vaccine has used adenoviruses, innocent bloodless viruses, which can produce proteins that stimulate the immune formula against expressed pathogens. Gamaleya also used this strategy to expand an experimental inoculation against some other coronavirus, the fatal Middle East respiratory syndrome.
While COVID-19 began to spread this year, Gamaleya scientists only took a few weeks to adapt their MERS adenovirus vectors to the new pathogen. After testing mice, guinea pigs and monkeys, the center’s director and key scientists injected the vaccine.
“My purpose is not to be the first in the world; is to protect the ones I like the most,” said Denis Logunov, Gamaleya’s deputy director of studies and head of the laboratory that developed the vaccine in July.
Gamaleya has secured key support for russia’s Direct Investment Fund, whose leader, Dmitriev, meets with Putin and works on some of the president’s most delicate global missions. RDIF studied more than two dozen vaccines in Russia and chose Gamaleya and its generation founded on human adenovirus because it had been used for years for other diseases, Dmitriev said. He accepted the task and took his image with his circle of relatives in April.
“We’re on the vaccine because we know the platform is incredibly secure,” he told Bloomberg Television on September 7.
As the coronavirus spread, repugnant officials and members of the business elite, Dmitriev and Gamaleya discreetly presented vaccines to many other tough people in Russia.
“The vaccine is the only way to get back to a general life,” said Andrey Guryev, executive director of fertilizers who empned over the summer. “It is vital that Russia is one of the first countries to have it. “
Preliminary trials included 76 people, the maximum of them army personnel. The others who won were officially registered as volunteers for trials and monitored, but no knowledge of them was published.
Peer-reviewed research, published in the medical journal Lancet only after Putin’s approval was announced, generated questions from scientists who said the effects of some volunteers seemed too similar to be plausible. While Gamaleya’s specialists responded, more main points will be published, they said. Enrico Bucci, biologist at Temple University in Philadelphia.
“We would like to have access to all the knowledge,” said Bucci, one of the authors of a letter to the magazine criticizing Gamaleya’s study. “The knowledge we ask for was not provided” in the reaction of Russian investigators to The Lancet, he said.
The COVID-19 vaccine policy and the countries that will receive them first have shaken up a dominance in which scientists paint in relative darkness. After U. S. President Donald Trump hinted that a vaccine could be approved before the November 3 election, drug brands joined forces to devote themselves to the criteria of protection and avoid shortcuts.
Sputnik developers, on the other hand, encouraged Putin to move his vaccine into the public sphere. After a stopover in Gamaleya’s laboratories through Russian Health Minister in early April, the mission instructed Putin to seek his support. At a televised video assembly a few days later, middle director Alexander Gintsburg asked the president to point to an expedited approval procedure based on promising animal data.
“We will do to speed up administrative procedures,” Putin replied.
Prior to August 11, gamaleya’s vaccine was just one of many pioneering projects worldwide, joined by Moderna Inc. , Oxford University with AstraZeneca Plc and the partnership between Pfizer Inc. BioNTech SE. Putin’s announcement of Sputnik V’s approval seemed to replace all of that.
“We are the first to sign one,” Putin said. ” It’s bureaucracy, durable antibodies and cellular immunity,” he told the government at the televised meeting. “I know because one of my daughters has been vaccinated. In that sense, she participated in the experiment.
Dmitriev, the head of THE DRIF, continued with a whirlwind of overseas appearances. Russian state television featured senior officials and politicians who won photographs and deliveries of the first small numbers in the country’s regions. More than 6,000 more people have gained the image since its approval in August and are reporting a special app.
Although China has also launched a vaccine for outdoor use in clinical trials, it has not applied for approval. Many of those vaccinated are in the military, where experimental immunizations have been used for national security reasons.
“In China, we are seeing greater adherence to the criteria and greater transparency about what is happening,” Hansen said of Airfinity. “At the end of the day, it’s in the state’s most productive interests. “
Meanwhile, Putin is moving forward, ordering an advertising crusade to help the Russians use the vaccine. RDIF has announced agreements with India, Brazil and Mexico to obtain or produce the vaccine locally. Putin promotioned the coup in a speech at the United Nations. providing it to get it loose rate to the organization’s staff around the world.
To assist in their case, DRIF officials announced that they would publish interim information on approximately 25,000 to 30,000 more people in the recent Phase 3 trial in October or early November. “Mass vaccination” will begin before that, Dmitriev said.