Russia said it approved a vaccine for coronavirus, but sceptics claim that it was not tested for protection and efficacy. Experts on vaccination say this is a potentially risky political act.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin today announced that his country is the first country to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine. He called Sputnik-V vaccine, a node to the world’s first artificial satellite launched over 60 years ago by the Soviet Union. The Russians state that in October they will begin the vaccine, even though they have not performed testing to see if it is safe and reliable.

And that day is today, according to Russia. Over the past 24 hours, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine was seemingly approved by Vladimir Putin. Good news. Great news indeed.

Yet many people at this event are understandably puzzled. For months we have been advised that the race to find a vaccine is more a marathon than a sprint. Also, the ambitious goals of the most successful vaccine initiatives will only start dosing by the end of 2020. Why has Russia been able to get the final blow and finish developing a vaccine months before everyone else?

Fauci, the U.S. director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported on the exclusive event for air August 13, via National Geographic, as part of a keynote interview to stop pandemics.

“I hope the Russians have proved the vaccine safe and successful, in reality,” Fauci told ABC News reporter Deborah Roberts, who moderated the case. “They did that, I seriously doubt.”

Russia indicated during the summer that it is working quickly on its vaccine candidate, Sputnik V after the nation’s breakthrough rocket, launched in 1960. In May, the Director of the Gamaleya Epidemiology and Microbiology Research Institute in Moscow where the vaccine is under production, and other researchers started evaluating the drug by themselves, with seventy-six subjects beginning a month later, in the first step of human studies.

Nonetheless, Gamaleya has not yet reported any human test results, usually requiring three phases for testing the health, efficacy and dosage of a drug. The Institute has also not conducted preclinical work involving animal models or experiments in Petri plates with cells.

Despite this public insufficiency, Russian President Vladimir Putin says the health authorities in Russia are able to allow the widespread use of the vaccine. “We will thank those who took this very critical first step for Russia and the world,” said Putin in a statement released today by the Kremlin.

The approval comes even though other Russian officials state that the trials are still in progress. step three. Kirill Dmitriev, Chief Executive Officer of the vaccine sponsored Russian Direct Investment Fund, told the Associated Press that the advanced trials in many nations, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, and probably Brazil are scheduled for starting August 12. But the AP did not locate any documents in the records of the Russian Ministry of Health citing such trials approved.

Phase three trials are crucial to confirm whether a large-scale vaccine is safe. The final test phase is intended to define the best dosage for the general public, which can only be decided by the delivery of vaccines to a number of thousands of people. The degree to which a vaccine works also decides this stage of the vaccine production.

According to a 2018 report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one vaccine in three trials consists of a prescribed dose and complies with proven safety and efficacy requirements. The US Food and Drug Administration has confirmed that a coronavirus vaccine would be approved only if it had a minimum efficacy of 50%.

“We’ve got half a dozen or more vaccines,” Roberts told Fauci. “We will begin to do this, you know, next week if we want to take the risk to hurt other people or give them something not working. Yet it doesn’t work that way.