Russia assured this Monday, August 3 that it would soon be able to produce hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines per month against the new coronavirus and " several million " from the beginning of next year.
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According to the Russian Minister of Commerce Denis Mantourov, three biomedical companies will be able to produce from September and industrially a vaccine developed by the research laboratory in epidemiology and microbiology Nikolaï Gamaleïa. " According to initial estimates (...) we will be able to provide several hundred thousand doses of vaccine per month from this year, then up to several million at the beginning of next year ," he said. at the public agency TASS.
Russia has been working for months, like many other countries in the world, on several vaccine projects against Covid-19. The one developed by the Gamaleïa center is in collaboration with the Ministry of Defense. A second vaccine prototype is being designed at the Vektor State Research Center in Siberia, and the first doses are expected in October, according to the authorities.
4th most affected country in terms of contamination
Russia, fourth in the world for the number of contaminations after the United States, Brazil and India, announced in April its desire to be among the first countries, if not the very first, to create a vaccine against virus.
Researchers, however, expressed concern at the speed of development of Russian vaccines, believing that certain steps could be skipped in order to speed up the work under pressure from the authorities, who compared this race to the vaccine to the launch by the USSR in 1957 of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. So far, Russia has not published a detailed study of the results of its trials to establish the effectiveness of the products it says it has developed.