Russia won the race for the coronavirus vaccine after placing the first country to officially sign one and claiming it in a position for use on Tuesday, despite less than two months of human testing and failing in the full final tests.
President Vladimir Putin at a government assembly on Tuesday that the vaccine, developed through the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute, had undergone “necessary testing” and even said the vaccine had already been given to one of his daughters.
Putin added that one of his two daughters had “participated in the experiment” and had won two injections of the vaccine.
She said her daughter had a temperature of 100.4 degrees the day of the first injection, and then dropped to just over 98.6 degrees the next day. After the blow, her back had a slight temperature rise, she said.
Live updates: Russia says it has a vaccine that opposes COVID-19; Big Ten, football meetings dealing with the end of the fall season
U.S. And vaccine candidates: federal spending exceeds $9 billion, extends to 7 companies
Putin said his daughter had “a lot of antibodies.” He did not specify which of his two daughters, Maria or Katerina, received the vaccine.
Russian scientists said they had completed phase 2 testing in the first week of August and were conducting phase 3 tests at the same time they were beginning to vaccinate medical personnel, a tactic that would never be allowed under strict U.S. medical protection regulations. And Europe.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said Russia could start vaccinating doctors starting this month. The Health Ministry said Tuesday that the vaccine deserves to provide immunity against the virus for up to two years.
While the Russian government said medical staff, teachers and other at-risk teams would be the first to be vaccinated, Putin said the vaccine would be voluntary.
The vaccine will be announced as Sputnik V in foreign markets. Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the time of the launch of the Soviet Union in 1957 of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, according to Reuters.
Russian officials said large-scale production of the vaccine would begin in September and mass vaccination could begin as early as October.
But the foreign clinical network is sounding the alarm that the rush to start the vaccine before phase 3 trials, which usually last months and involve thousands of other people, are finalised can be counterproductive.
“I don’t know what Russia is doing, but in fact I wouldn’t take a vaccine that hasn’t been tested in Phase III,” said Florian Krammer, a professor of vaccination at the Department of Microbiology at Icahn Medical School in Mount Sinai. . Twitter on Tuesday. “No one knows if it is or if it works.”
Prior to Putin’s announcement, there were reports that Russia was seeking to borrow vaccine research. The United States, Britain and Canada alleged on July 16 that Russian government-backed hackers sought to borrow data from pharmaceutical researchers and corporations rushing to expand a COVID-19 vaccine.
The 3 countries claim that the piracy organization APT29, also known as Cozy Bear, attacks educational and pharmaceutical research establishments concerned about the progression of coronavirus vaccines.
Although Russia has a long history of vaccine creation, its efforts against coronaviruses have been shrouded in a mystery. Its candidate vaccine is indexed as in phase 1 trials in the World Health Organization’s candidate vaccine list, and little data have been published on this topic.
“It’s actually like reading tea leaves,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “Russian science has been ridiculously secretive.”
“WHO is aware that a COVID-19 vaccine has been registered in the National Medicine Register of the Russian Federation,” the signature told USA TODAY. “WHO is in contact with Russian scientists and government and looks forward to reviewing the main points of the trials.”
Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Public Interest Medicine, said that bad vaccines are not only useless against SARS-CoV-2, but can also damage public fitness by propeling the virus to evolve and strengthen.
“I’m not in the Russian vaccine. I don’t play Russian roulette in my health,” Pitts said. “Vaccines are too vital to become propaganda. Matrix… The only thing worse than the lack of a vaccine is a bad vaccine.”
Contribution: Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY; The Associated Press. Follow Adrianna Rodríguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
USA TODAY’s patient conditioning and protection policy is made imaginable as a component through a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competence in the Health Sector. The Masimo Foundation does not provide any editorial contributions.