Coronavirus vaccine tracker, August 17: First batch of Russian vaccines ready, roll out from August-end
Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine tracker August 17 update: The Reuters report said Russia would roll out the vaccine by the end of this month. That is earlier than its previous announcements of making the vaccine available by September, and starting mass inoculations by October.
An employee shows a new vaccine at the Nikolai Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, Russia (AP)
The first batch of the Russian vaccine for novel Coronavirus has been produced, according to a report in Reuters news agency. Russia had, on August 11, that a vaccine being developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute was ready and had been approved. It’s the first novel Coronavirus vaccine to be approved for public use.
The Reuters report said Russia would roll out the vaccine by the end of this month. That is earlier than its previous announcements about making the vaccine available by September and starting mass inoculations by October.
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The Russian announcementhas been received with some amount of scepticismin the global scientific community because of the fact that vaccine has been approved without the mandatory phase-III human trials.
The vaccine went through phase-I and phase-II testing in superfast time, the entire process being completed in less than two months, when usually vaccines take several months, sometimes years, to complete these trials.
