Some 1.5 million people have been vaccinated against coronavirus with Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine, Russia said on Monday.
“We cannot say how many of them received it in Russia and how many in the rest of the world,” AFP was told by Arseni Palagin, a spokesman for the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which financed the vaccine’s development.
Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said at the start of the year that 800,000 Russians had been vaccinated and 1.5 million doses had been distributed.
The vaccine is administered in two doses, with the two jabs to be administered three weeks apart.
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Russia became the first country to license a coronavirus vaccine in August, doing so before it had started phase 3 of clinical trials for the vaccine and before any scientific results were published.
Results that were then published in medical journal The Lancet were subsequently called into question.
In the EU, meanwhile, only the coronavirus vaccines by Pfizer / BioNTech and by Moderna have a conditional marketing authorisation, meaning they can be used.
The list of vaccines could be expanded to include the AstraZeneca / University of Oxford vaccine at the end of January, as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) received additional information on the vaccine and is expecting an application for conditional marketing authorisation as soon as this week.
Belgium is currently working on a vaccination barometer to map people who have received their vaccinations in the country, various members of Belgium's vaccination task force said over the weekend.
Jason Spinks
The Brussels Times
