More information on COVID-19 vaccines

20/08/2020
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President Vladimir Putin announced that the completion of the first registered coronavirus vaccine has been approved for use in the country and will soon go into production.

 

The president reported the news during a cabinet meeting on August 11. The Russian vaccine’s name is Sputnik V, taken from the game-changing 1957 satellite, the first to be launched into space. He added that his daughter has already tested the vaccine on herself. After the first injection, her temperature rose to 38, then dropped to just over 37 the next day, Putin said.

 

Health Minister Mikhaeil Murashko added that the vaccine will be manufactured by the Gamaleya Research Institute, run by the government, together with 'Binofarm', starting in September 2020. It will be financed by the Russian Investment Fund Direct (RDIF), which allocated four billion rubles (US$ 54.2 million) for the task. It will also undergo international testing, in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and several countries in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, according to RDIF director Kirill Dmitriev.

 

The vaccine against a new coronavirus infection was registered for the first time in the world in Russia on August 11

 

Sputnik reported that twenty countries have already placed an order for a total of 1 billion units.

 

"Together with international partners, we are prepared to produce more than 500 million doses per year in five countries, with plans to further expand production capacity," said Dmitriev.

 

The vaccine will be widely available from January 1, 2021, according to the official channel of the Moscow coronavirus operational center.

 

Doctors and school teachers will be the first to receive the injection in Russia, according to the Health Minister.

 

Putin, announced that the vaccine will be only

voluntary.

 

Manufacturing and testing

 

Scientists at the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology have been developing the vaccine since February, when it first became clear that the world was grappling with a serious threat. The development team is led by the microbiologist and deputy director of the center, Denis Logunov.

 

Development of the vaccine took just 14 days, Logunov said in an interview with the online publication Meduza. According to him, the MERS vaccine (which had its outbreak in 2012-2013) took around three years in research before development could begin.

 

A scientist who works at the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology during the production and testing of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Moscow, said it was almost ready, on August 6, 2020.

 

It was a slow process, and by August 2020, the Center was only in Phase 2 of clinical trials.

 

“When the new coronavirus appeared, a close relative [of Covid-19] from the beta-coronavirus family, we were left with no doubts about how to approach the development. There were no creative struggles. It was a copy-paste job in the literal sense of the word,” added Logunov.

 

A scientist who works inside a laboratory of the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology during the production and laboratory testing of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Moscow, Russia, was ready on August 6, 2020.

 

Vadim Tarasov, one of the leading scientists at the university where the trials were carried out, said Russia had a "head start" as it has spent the last 20 years working in the field. The technology behind the Russian vaccine is based on the adenovirus, also known as the common cold, Tarasov said. Artificially created, the proteins in the vaccine replicate those of Covid-19 and trigger "an immune response similar to that caused by the coronavirus itself," he revealed.

 

There were mild side effects in the subjects, namely a temperature spike, some pain, and a rash around the injection site.

 

An English vaccine for Latin America

 

The Sputnik V vaccine spoils Astra-Zeneca's plans to produce a dubious vaccine, on whose bad side effects Astra-Zeneca spokesmen have already announced that Astra Zeneca does not accept any legal responsibility. That vaccine was allegedly developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford . A deceptive credential and in bad public faith, because the old aristocratic University of Oxford has great world renown in the area of humanities and customs and distinguished uses, but it is not known for prestigious credentials in Bio-chemistry.

 

Astra Zeneca was negotiating the production of its supposed vaccine for Latin America in Argentina and Mexico, a reason that explains why the governments of those two countries and that of Chile continue to sow fear with unnecessary preventive measures: because the epidemic is over and it has been proven that 95% of those affected survive, as with any seasonal flu. The orchestrated uproar has the same objective as the one that arose around the swine flu some 3 years ago and that served as a pretext for the government of Nicolás Sarkosy in France to buy 3 million vaccines from his brother's pharmaceutical company: that is, to sell the English vaccine will sell at $ 30 a dose. If this unjustified uproar succeeds in getting governments to declare it mandatory, we are talking about a business of $30 x 7 billion inhabitants. We are talking about a 210 billion business. This means that there is a lot of money in commissions to distribute to the usual politicians, so that they buy it under the pretext of preventing a deadly epidemic. Meanwhile those same politicians take exaggerated and unnecessary measures to scare the gregarious and mindless population that they lead like a herd towards a social engineering that is Orwellianly called the New Normal. The cost of confinements and anti-socializing distancing has an atrocious and deadly cost for the economy of countries that, like France, Spain and Italy live off tourism.

 

Producing Sputnik V in Latin-America

 

The cheap vaccine is the Russian one called Sputnik V whose production in Latin America is negotiated by Russia with Brazil and the state of Paraná.

 

The Chinese vaccine

 

China has approved its first # COVID19 # vaccine patent, which has been developed by the team of Chen Wei, an infectious disease expert from China. The phase 2 trial of the candidate vaccine found that the vaccine is safe and induces an immune response, China Global Television Network (CGTN) said on Twitter.

 

Citing data from clinical trials published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, China's state news agency Xinhua has already reported that China's COVID-19 vaccine is "safe and elicits an immune response."

 

The research involved 320 "healthy volunteers" between the ages of 18 and 59, of whom 96 participated in phase 1 clinical trials and 224 in phase 2 trials, he said.

 

Xinhua said the results indicated that the vaccine induced neutralizing antibodies in the volunteers and demonstrated a good ability to trigger an immune response.

 

(Translated and updated by the author)

 

Almeria 19/08/2020

 

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/208560
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