Russia announced last month that its vaccine, called “Sputnik V” in honor of the Soviet-era satellite that was first introduced to the area in 1957, had already obtained approval.
“The first participants have already been vaccinated in clinics in the capital,” Deputy Mayor Anastasia Rakova, head of social development, said in a statement.
The allocation of the vaccine is financed through the Russian sovereign fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
The vaccine evolved through the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow in coordination with the Russian Ministry of Defense.
High-level Russians have already been vaccinated, adding the daughter of President Vladimir Putin, nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobianin.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the president would “inform him himself” if he was vaccinated.
The Moscow city government said another 40,000 people in the capital can get the vaccine, administered in two doses 21 days apart.
He says they are participating in a “post-registration study” of the vaccine.
These volunteers must not have had COVID-19 or recent contact with a user in poor health and must not be pregnant or seeking to have a baby.
Rakova more than 35,000 Muscovites had already been deployed online.
The city of Moscow states that volunteers will be largely monitored through a specially created application.
Russia will also soon make the vaccine so that other people belonging to high-risk groups have it: doctors and teachers, who will obtain it voluntarily and will also be monitored.
Russia has raised concerns among Western scientists by stating that the vaccine had gained approval before full clinical trials were completed.
Patients in the first trials involving 76 other people developed antibodies, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet last week, while experts said the trials were too small to show their protection and efficacy.
The Phase Three trials, which the Health Department said began Wednesday, are more rigorous and come with some volunteers receiving a placebo and will participate in multiple countries, according to the vaccine website.
Russia has said it is in a position to manufacture 500 million doses of the vaccine per year.
The country has shown more than a million cases of the coronavirus and another 18,305 people have died.