Russia’s New COVID-19 Vaccine Are Raising Some Serious Concerns

A few weeks ago, Russia announced that it had completed human trials for its COVID-19 vaccine.

News reports stated that soon, this COVID-19 vaccine could receive regulatory approval to be the first vaccine in the world to be passed for human use.

CNN reveals that the Russian authorities are planning on getting the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Gamleya Institute ready on 10 August or even earlier than that. However, it is important to note that Russia has yet to complete the Phase II trials of the vaccine. The researchers are going to conduct Phase III and Phase II simultaneously, by vaccinating its medical workers.

Kirill Dmitriev, head of the country’s sovereign wealth fund which is sponsoring Rusian vaccine research said in a conversation with CNN that this was a Sputnik moment.

While to many people, this might sound like a piece of good news that we finally have a cure for the contagious disease, there are some concerns remain.

First of all, the conducted trial was quite small with around 20 volunteers while other vaccines being developed around the world have thousands of candidates. Moreover, it seems to be the process is being fairly rushed.

Russia is not being transparent about the kind of technology that it uses to develop the vaccine. Officials of the country stated that they were using human adenovirus vectors that had been made weaker so that they wouldn’t replicate in the human body.

Meanwhile, most vaccine candidates need two of these vectors. The authorities state that by August, their scientific data will be issued for review and publication, to clear some doubts.

Recently, Russian authorities dismissed claims saying that Russian hackers attacked Canadian, American, and British labs to steal COVID-vaccines’ research data.

Besides the COVID-19 vaccine of Russia, other potential candidates are the ChAdOx1 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the mRNA vaccine of US-based Moderna. For the final human trials, the Oxford vaccine has recruited about 5,000 volunteers while 30,000 volunteers take part in Moderna’s trial.

>>> Russia Successfully Completes COVID-19 Vaccine Human Trials, Volunteer Discharged At The End Of July