07/14/2021 14:08
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 07/14/2021 2:26 PM
Russia will begin to vaccinate adolescents against the coronavirus next month with Sputnik V, announced this Wednesday the director of the Gamaleya institute, which developed the drug that is also used and has been developed in Argentina for weeks.
The decision was announced just as Russia faces a strong outbreak of coronavirus that began a few weeks ago and attributed to the Delta variant, which was first identified in India and is highly contagious.
For nine days in a row, the country has exceeded 700 deaths associated with the virus, and on two occasions so far this month it has reported more than 25,000 cases per day, a figure that had not been reported since the beginning of last January.
The director of the Gamaleya National Center, Alexander Gintsburg, told the Russian news agency Ria Novosti that vaccination of adolescents will begin
when the tests already carried out on volunteers between 12 and 17 years old are finished
.
The Richmond laboratory produces the Sputnik vaccine in the country.
Of the 100 study participants, 21 boys and girls received the first component of the formula and
only two "raised a fever of more than 37 degrees
," Gintsburg said,
Ria Novosti
reported
.
"This is a normal reaction, which means, sorry, they are not injecting saline, but the vaccine. If they hadn't measured it, they probably wouldn't have noticed," Gunzburg said of the progress of the tests.
"The vaccination against the coronavirus of adolescents
must begin before September 20,
" he estimated.
The trial began on July 5 at the ZA Bashlyaeva Children's Hospital and the Morozov Children's Hospital in Moscow, he explained.
A shipment of Sputnik V vaccines arrives in Ezeiza.
The volunteers underwent PCR tests to confirm that they were not developing the disease and then a lower dose of Sputnik V, which is used for adults, was applied.
The tests and the imminent beginning of the application to adolescents will be followed closely in the country because Sputnik V
is the vaccine that most arrived in the country
and for weeks it has been developed by the Richmond laboratory in Pilar.
According to official data released by the Government, of the more than 30 million vaccines that arrived in the country, 11,868,830 are from Sputnik V (9,375,670 from the first component and 2,493,160 from the second).
Sputnik V was the first vaccine against Covid-19 to be registered worldwide, last August, and since then its use has been approved and adopted by some 70 countries, including Argentina and Brazil, where a total of 3,500 live. millions of people.
The vaccine has not yet been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the regulatory body of the European Union (EU), nor by the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN health agency.
The
endorsement of the WHO is necessary so that it can be added to Covax
, the program sponsored by the WHO to distribute coronavirus vaccines among low-income countries and compensate for its criticized hoarding by the richest nations.
Sputnik V was met with skepticism outside of Russia until its efficacy of more than 90% was validated by the British medical journal The Lancet last February.
The Delta variant of the coronavirus appears to have a predilection for the unvaccinated, and Gunzburg emphasized that recently the number of children with a more severe course of the disease than before, and therefore "in need of protection, has increased."
Days ago, the Russian Federal Consumer Protection and Welfare Supervision Service or Rospotrebnadzor, warned that the population of adolescents and pre-adolescents is the most susceptible to the Delta variant.
Russia registered 786 deaths
from coronavirus in the last 24 hours, breaking its own record for the second day in a row and exceeding 145,000, the Russian body to fight the pandemic reported today.
This is the ninth day in a row with more than 700 deaths from coronavirus in Russia, a mark that was surpassed for the first time last week amid a strong outbreak across the country attributed to the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus.
Russia accumulates 145,278 deaths from the virus, the highest figure for a country in Europe, and more than 5.87 million cases.
With information from Télam.
AFG
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