Is Russia cooking up a second Covid vaccine?
The second Russian Covid vaccine, Reuters reports, was developed at the Vector Institute in Siberia and would have completed its first human tests last month. The results of the tests are not known nor the vaccine tests would have reached stage III.
A radiant Vladimir Putin was able to announce last Wednesday, during a government meeting, that the Russian regulatory authorities have approved a second anti-Covid vaccine.
The vaccine, Reuters reports , was developed at the Vector Institute in Siberia and would have completed the first tests on humans last month. The results of the tests are not known nor the vaccine tests would have reached stage III.
We are therefore at the preliminary stages of the development of a product which, however, greatly gratifies Russian pride.
"We need to increase the production of the first and second vaccines," Putin said on TV, referring to Sputnik, the first Russian vaccine that the world learned of last month .
"We must continue to cooperate with our foreign partners", added the Russian president, "and promote our vaccine abroad".
The new vaccine is called EpiVacCorona and, as far as is known, it has been tested on 100 volunteers between 18 and 60 years old in Novosibirsk
Instead, a large-scale test is planned for November or December, involving 30,000 volunteers, 5,000 of whom will be resident in Siberia.
Russia is also developing a third vaccine against Covid-19 at the Chunakov Institute in St. Petersburg. The first texts on humans, which will be about 300, should start on October 19.
Since the start of the pandemic, the Coronavirus has infected about 1,340,000 people in Russia, placing the country in fourth place in the world after the USA, India and Brazil.
PROS AND AGAINST THE RUSSIAN SPUTNIK VACCINE. BLOOMBERG REPORT
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/la-russia-ha-un-secondo-vaccino-anti-covid/ on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:50:23 +0000.