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Coronavirus vaccine doses in Moscow: Allegedly "safe and well tolerated"
Photo: Stanislav Krasilnikov / ITAR-TASS / imago images
In Moscow, vaccination against the corona virus will start on Monday.
This was announced by the mayor of the Russian capital, Sergei Sobyanin.
First of all, volunteers and risk groups should be given the vaccine.
In an interview published by the state-run Erste Kanal on Saturday, Sobjanin named health and education workers, law enforcement officials and energy suppliers as examples.
The city administration announced on Friday that the first three Moscow clinics had already received doses of vaccine.
According to the Moscow authorities, up to 40,000 volunteers should be able to be vaccinated.
Within a few days, 5,000 people are said to have reported who are ready to have the vaccine injected.
The mayor had already told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday that he had been vaccinated on a video link.
His body temperature did not rise afterwards, Sobyanin replied to Putin's question.
He had practically no side effects, just a bit of a headache like a flu shot, he said.
Doubts about security
The vaccine is actually only approved for people up to the age of 60.
Sobjanin is 62 years old.
His deputies and other politicians have also allegedly had themselves vaccinated.
State television showed pictures of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday, who was given the vaccine, as it was called.
He is 65 years old.
Putin had already approved the vaccine at the beginning of August, it was the world's first government approval of a vaccine against the coronavirus.
This is effective and forms a permanent immunity, he said at the time to justify it.
His daughter has already been vaccinated.
However, it is not known whether he had the vaccine administered.
The problem with the vaccine called "Sputnik V" is: So far, the drug has only been tested on a few people.
The scientific consensus, however, is to check the effects and side effects of a vaccine in large clinical studies on thousands of test subjects before approval.
Western scientists therefore sharply criticized the Russian approval.
You have doubts about the safety of the vaccination.
The individual descriptions do not change anything.
"You are scared"
Confidence in "Sputnik V" is therefore not high in Russia either: According to a survey by the state institute Wziom, 42 percent of the Russians questioned said that they would most likely be vaccinated, 52 percent said that they did not want to.
"They are afraid, do not believe in it, are afraid," said the Wziom director.
Mayor Sobyanin emphasized on Saturday that the test phase would continue in Moscow and will likely last two to six months.
"There will most likely be a mass vaccination at the end of the year or the beginning of next year," said the mayor.
On Friday, Russian researchers published preliminary results of tests with the Russian vaccine in the journal "The Lancet".
It is "safe and well tolerated", say the Russian researchers.
They reported on two small studies that each included 38 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 60.
All of them received two doses of vaccine every three weeks and developed antibodies within the first 21 days.
Studies: "Encouraging but Insignificant"
However, there was criticism of the number of subjects tested;
it is too low to provide clear evidence of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
Typically, subjects in clinical trials are given either the vaccine to be tested or a placebo, but neither of the test groups did so.
To ensure the long-term effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, larger and longer studies would have to be carried out, including a placebo group, the researchers admitted themselves.
The scientist Naor Bar-Zeev from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the USA, who was not involved in the study, called the study "encouraging but insignificant".
Among other things, it does not contain any data on effectiveness in older age groups who are particularly susceptible to Covid-19.
"Proof of safety will be crucial for vaccines against Covid-19, not only for vaccine acceptance but also for general confidence in vaccinations," he commented in The Lancet.
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