Professor of Medicine and Chief Operating Officer of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation has described Russia’s recent announcement that it has developed a COVID-19 vaccine as a risky move.
Professor Linda-Gail Bekker says Russia’s short-cut is unacceptable and worrying.
She says, “When a vaccine has been tested under trial conditions, people are very carefully monitored and they understand the risks they are taking for this informed process and they are obviously in that limited experiment. Once you move to rolling this out in the public, that is a very different message, it says we believe this works and we are doing this for your own well-being and so trust us, go for it…”
Russia says it is the first country to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19 vaccine, an approval that comes after less than two months of human testing. The move by Moscow has been likened to its success in the Cold War-era space race.
Moscow’s decision to grant approval for the vaccine, which will be called “Sputnik V” in homage to the world’s first satellite launched by the Soviet Union, before final trials have been completed has raised concerns among some experts.
COVID-19 Pandemic | Two new vaccine trials to start in South Africa
However Russian government officials have say the vaccine will be administered to medical personnel, and then to teachers, on a voluntary basis at the end of this month or in early September, while mass roll-out in the country is expected to start in October.
The vaccine is administered in two doses and consists of two serotypes of a human adenovirus, each carrying an S-antigen of the new coronavirus, which enter human cells and produce an immune response.
Meanwhile Wits University in collaboration with the University of Oxford, and the Oxford Jenner Institute will be rolling out two more coronavirus vaccine trials in South Africa.
Around 2 000 volunteers will be screened and then given either the vaccine or a placebo.
This follows the June launch of the first COVID-19 vaccine to be tested on the continent.
The South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) says that the trial of the Johnson & Johnson products called Ad26.Cov2-S and Novavax NVX-CoV2373 will begin in South Africa next month.
Additional reporting: Reuters
