Written by Andrew Osborn and Polina Nikolskaya
Moscow (Reuters) – Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine will cost $ 20 per person in international markets, and Moscow plans to produce more than a billion doses next year at home and abroad, financial backers and developers said Tuesday.
The Sputnik V vaccine, named after the Soviet-era satellite that triggered the space race by nodding the geopolitical significance of the project to Moscow, will be administered in two shots, each costing less than $ 10, the official Sputnik V Twitter account writes.
Vaccination will be free for Russian citizens. The so-called III. With the continuation of phase-in clinical trials, vaccination in Russia, which accounts for the fifth largest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, has not yet started.
The Kremlin said Tuesday that President Vladimir Putin has yet to be vaccinated with Sputnik V. His situation means he can’t do something that is still being negotiated, he says. One of her two daughters took her, Putin announced in August, and then had a good time.
Russia’s bid comes when Russia wants to increase distribution and production, as well as three vaccines, one from AstraZeneca and one from Pfizer / BioNTech
Moscow, which wants global market share, called the international price of Sputnik V competitive.
“It is more than twice as cheap as other vaccines with the same effectiveness,” Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund, said in a briefing.
“Currently, Sputnik V is the cheapest vaccine with an efficacy level in excess of 90% in Phase III clinical trials.”
The Russian vaccine is cheaper than some other Western rivals, such as the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which costs € 15.5 per shot, but is more expensive than the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, which costs around 2 per shot in Europe. For 5 euros.
Russia plans to produce about 2 million doses of Sputnik V this year, and Dmitrijev said Moscow and its foreign partners were able to deliver more than a billion doses from next year, enough to vaccinate more than 500 million people.
More than 50 countries have requested more than 1.2 billion doses, he said. Shipments to the global market would be produced by partners in India, Brazil, China, South Korea, Hungary and other countries.
“Freeze-dried and effective”
The production of a new, freeze-dried form of the vaccine – which means it can be refrigerated and easier to distribute – is also underway, he said, which he says makes it attractive to African and Asian countries.
Negotiations with other foreign partners to increase production were also ongoing, he added.
RDIF and the Gamaleya National Center previously announced on Tuesday that new clinical trial data based on 39 confirmed cases and 18,794 patients, both of which were taken, showed that Sputnik V was 91.4% effective on day 28. and is above 95% effective on day 42.
This is well above the 50% efficacy threshold for COVID-19 vaccines set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The data can be examined by experts in a leading scientific journal next month – promised Dmitriev.
The shot III. Its phase trial is being held at 29 clinics across Moscow and involves a total of 40,000 volunteers, a quarter of whom have received placebo.
Russia’s health system is under severe strain, the Kremlin said on Tuesday as authorities reported a record 491 deaths related to COVID-19 and an increase in infections.
Russia has been criticized by some Western scientists who accused him of trying to get the vaccine and complained about the amount of data available for others to interpret his research.
In particular, some Western scientists have criticized Moscow for giving the shot to the regulations and launching mass vaccinations before the full experiments were completed.
Russia has rejected such criticisms and insisted on doing everything safely and responsibly. Allegedly, a Western campaign of dirty tricks is stopping people from getting vaccinated in what he thinks has become a struggle for legitimacy and market share.
Dmitry on Tuesday praised Western success in developing vaccines, saying the world would need other vaccines. According to him, Russia is ready to share its know-how with manufacturers like AstraZeneca if it is useful.
(Report by Andrew Osborn and Polina Nikolskaya; additional report by Anton Zverev, Maxim Rodionov and the Moscow Newsroom; edited by Nick Macfie)
