Russia ‘could have Covid-19 vaccine by September’, official claims

A top Russian official said his country could roll out a vaccine against Covid-19 as soon as September, while denying accusations that hackers working for the country’s intelligence agency tried to steal sensitive data from rival researchers in Britain , the US and Canada 

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Russia may be one of the first to produce a vaccine against the backdrop of the billions that are being invested in the US and all the pharma companies working on it,” said Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive of the government-backed Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which is financing one of the country’s effort to devise a vaccine.

President

Vladimir Putin has made finding a vaccine a top priority. Russia has recorded more than 750,000 Covid-19 cases, making it the fourth most-affected country in the world. In Russia’s race to be the first to find a vaccine against Covid-19, it’s taking an approach that would be shunned in other countries, claiming it will know in just three months of trials whether its leading candidate works.

Dmitriev said Russia had no need to steal information from rival vaccine developers because it had already  

signed a deal with AstraZeneca to manufacture the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine

at R-Pharm, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Russia. He said AstraZeneca is transferring the entire technological process and all ingredients for the full reproduction of the vaccine in Russia.

“Everything that is needed to produce the British vaccine has already been transferred to R-Pharm,” he said. “AstraZeneca has already signed commitments to transfer all production of the British vaccine to R-Pharm.”

“We don’t see a history of innovative vaccines being developed in Russia that win approval” in major markets like the US, Japan and western Europe, he said. “Russia is not a major producer of export quality drugs or biologics.”

The US, western Europe and  China have all set up research programmes and supply chains for Covid-19 vaccine production. While the negotiations with AstraZeneca offer Russia the chance for doses of the Oxford vaccine if it proves successful, the global battle to secure supplies could leave Russia struggling to access other potentially successful vaccines, increasing pressure to advance its own programme.

Dmitriev said he is so confident in Russia’s leading vaccine candidate that he has taken it himself and had his whole family vaccinated, including his parents, who are in their seventies. The vaccine, financed by RDIF and developed by the state-backed Gamaleya Institute in Moscow, has completed a phase 1 trial in 50 people, all of whom are members of the Russian military. The institute has not published results.

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/russia-central-asia/article/3093786/coronavirus-russia-could-have-covid-19-vaccine