(Moscow) Russia assured Monday that it would soon be able to produce hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines against the new coronavirus per month and "several million" from the beginning of next year.
France Media Agency
According to the Russian Minister of Commerce Denis Mantourov, three biomedical companies will be able to produce from September and industrially a vaccine developed by the research laboratory in epidemiology and microbiology Nikolaï Gamaleïa.
"According to initial estimates, [...] we will be able to provide several hundred thousand doses of vaccine per month from this year, then subsequently up to several million at the start of next year", a- he specified to the public agency TASS.
The head of the Russian Fund for Direct Investment, involved in development, said Monday that official approval of the vaccine should be done "within ten days."
"We will be ahead not only of the United States, but other countries as well. This will be the first licensed coronavirus vaccine, "Kirill Dmitriev said on television.
Russia has been working for months, like many other countries in the world, on several COVID vaccine projects - 19 . The one developed by the Gamaleïa center is in collaboration with the Ministry of Defense.
The ministry boasted Monday in a statement of clinical trials on military personnel who "clearly showed an apparent immune response" to the new coronavirus, "without side effects or abnormalities."
This vaccine is viral vector, that is to say it uses as a carrier another virus that has been transformed and adapted to fight COVID - 19. It uses adenovirus, a technology also chosen by the University of Oxford.
Researchers, however, expressed their concern at the speed of the development of Russian vaccines, believing that certain steps could be skipped in order to speed up the work under pressure from the authorities, who compared this race to the vaccine at the launch by the USSR in 57 of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
Impossible
Vitali Zverev, professor and head of laboratory at the Metchnikov research institute, told AFP that it was far too early to approve a vaccine that has not been sufficiently tested to be successful. ensure its safety.
"It is impossible to ensure the safety of a vaccine during a period of time such as that which separates us from the start of the pandemic", he explained, adding that the Russian biomedical companies that had to produce the vaccine were not used to it, let alone the advanced technology that had to be used.
Scientists at the Gamaleïa center were criticized in May for having personally injected their prototype vaccine, a method breaking with the usual protocols intended to speed up the scientific process as much as possible.
So far, Russia has not published a detailed study of the results of its tests to establish the effectiveness of the products it says it has developed.
A second vaccine prototype is being designed at the Vektor State Research Center in Siberia, the first doses of which are expected in October, according to the authorities.
Russia, fourth in the world for the number of contaminations after the United States, Brazil and India, declared in April its desire to be among the first countries, if not the very first, to create a vaccine against the virus.
