Russia says its third Covid-19 vaccine is ‘almost ready’

By Lokmat English Desk | Published: October 17, 2020 02:16 PM2020-10-17T14:16:00+5:302020-10-17T14:20:01+5:30

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Russia announced its first vaccine Sputnik V in August becoming the first country to have come up with a Covid-19 vaccine.

On October 14, the country approved a second Covid-19 vaccine. Reports said the country has claimed it has a third vaccine ready at Chumakov Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

It is an inactivated vaccine, which once approved will take the country’s vaccine number to three, and this is likely to happen by December 2020, reports said. Russia at present is undergoing a second wave of Covid-19. On october 14, the country had 1,340,000 cases with an average daily increment rate of 1.1 per cent.

According to the information, Russia is not doing large-scale trials of its coronavirus vaccines and therefore, it has announced two vaccines between August and September.

The first vaccine was Sputnik V. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughter was administered the vaccine.

The post-registration clinical trials of Sputnik V vaccine are underway with 13,000 volunteers.

The second vaccine was EpiVacCorona which was being touted as safer than Sputnik V. EpiVacCorona consists of short synthetic peptide fragments of virus proteins.

The first batch of 60,000 doses of the second vaccine against the novel virus will be produced in the near future. Vektor Centre will launch post-registration clinical trials in a number of Russian regions involving 40,000 volunteers.

The second Russian COVID-19 vaccine against the contagion disease will be administered on 150 people of age over 60 to check its efficacy among the older population.