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MOSCOW (AP) – Thousands of doctors, teachers and other members of high-risk groups have signed up for COVID-19 vaccinations in Moscow from Saturday, the precursor to a large-scale vaccination effort in the scale of Russia.
The vaccinations come three days after President Vladimir Putin ordered the launch of a “large-scale” COVID-19 vaccination campaign, even though a Russian-designed vaccine has yet to complete the advanced studies necessary to ensure its efficacy and safety in accordance with established scientific principles. protocols.
The Russian leader said on Wednesday that more than 2 million doses of the sputnik V jab will be available in the coming days, allowing authorities to offer jabs to medical workers and teachers across the country from the end of the week. next.
Moscow, which currently accounts for about a quarter of the country’s new daily infections, got a head start by opening 70 vaccination centers on Saturday. Doctors, teachers and city workers were urged to set aside an hour to receive a shot, and Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin said around 5,000 people had signed up within hours of the system starting. to run on Friday.
Russia boasted that Sputnik V was the world’s “first registered COVID-19 vaccine” after the government gave it regulatory approval in early August. The move drew criticism from international experts, who pointed out that the vaccine had only been tested on dozens of people at the time.
Putin ignored his doubts about the matter, saying in August that one of his daughters was among the first to be vaccinated.
Over the past few months, Sputnik V has been offered to medical workers and teachers even while still in the midst of advanced testing. Several senior officials said they also received the beatings and earlier this week the Russian military began vaccinating crews of Navy ships scheduled to depart on missions.
Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people in Russia had already received the vaccines.
The free vaccine is available to people between the ages of 18 and 60 who do not have chronic illnesses and are not pregnant or breastfeeding.
The two-plane Sputnik V was developed by the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute. An advanced study of 40,000 volunteers was announced two weeks after the vaccine received government approval and is still ongoing.
Last month, the vaccine’s developers said an interim analysis of trial data showed it to be 91.4 percent effective. The finding was based on 39 infections among 18,794 study participants who received both doses of the vaccine or a placebo, which is a much lower number of infections than what Western manufacturers looked at when evaluating the effectiveness of their vaccines. Two other vaccines designed by Russia are also being tested.
Britain on Wednesday became the first Western country to allow the use of a coronavirus vaccine developed by US drug maker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.
Russia has been swept away by a resurgence of the epidemic this fall, with the number of new infections surpassing levels seen at the start of the pandemic, but authorities have so far refrained from a strict lockdown imposed in the spring.
Russia reported a new daily high of 28,782 infections on Saturday, including 7,993 in Moscow. The government task force has recorded a total of 42,684 virus-related deaths since the start of the epidemic.
Russia’s total of more than 2.4 million confirmed cases is currently the fourth highest number of cases in the world behind the United States, India and Brazil.
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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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