Putin announces success, release of coronavirus vaccine. Worth believing?
On Tuesday August 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had created and registered a vaccine against the coronavirus. The world reacted with skepticism and dismay.
Who created the vaccine?
According to official reports, the manufacturer of the vaccine is the Gamaleya Institute of Virology, supported by the Russian Ministry of Defense, the agency that received the largest allocations to fight the pandemic.
Why has the world reacted with skepticism?
All countries around the world have adopted a standard scheme for testing new drugs and vaccines. The main goal is to ensure the effectiveness and safety of new drugs.
The first stage is laboratory research.
The second stage is animal testing.
The third stage is testing on a small group of volunteers (several thousand people).
The fourth stage is testing on tens of thousands of people.
In Russia, the vaccine has passed the third stage, while the group of subjects consisted of 400 people (conscripts of the Ministry of Defense). The fourth stage has not even begun, but the registration of the vaccine has already been announced. President Putin even announced that his daughter had received the new vaccine.
The global reaction was not long in coming.
The World Health Organization warned against the use of drugs that have not passed the full test cycle.
The US Secretary of Health said that in developing a vaccine against coronavirus, the US is striving not for global primacy, but for its reliability and effectiveness.
Research to create a vaccine against coronavirus at the BIOCAD laboratory in St. Petersburg, Russia. REUTERS / Anton Vaganov
Even the Russian Association of Clinical Trials Participants has appealed to the government to prevent the use of the new vaccine, the safety of which has not been proven.
As for Putin’s daughter, numerous social media users note: Putin admits that he has two daughters, but their names and the circumstances of their life are kept in the strictest confidence. No one has ever seen their adult photos with their father.
What’s next: from whom and when to expect the vaccine?
Several scientific groups in the United States and Europe are developing a vaccine against coronavirus.
According to experts, scientists from Oxford University in Great Britain have advanced the farthest; they were the first to decipher the genome of the new virus.
The question that worries everyone on the planet is when the appearance of a truly effective and safe vaccine that has passed a full test cycle can be expected.
US President Trump has conjectured that this will happen at the end of 2020; he is up for re-election in November. Most scientists are looking at January-February 2021 as a more likely timeframe.
Meanwhile, the Russian government announced that teachers and doctors would be the first to be vaccinated. Whether this procedure will be voluntary is not reported.
