More than two million Russians have been administered two doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus, and two million more have received their first dose, Vladimir Putin announced on Thursday (March 4).
Read also: Sputnik V: Russia ready to provide vaccines to 50 million Europeans from June
This statement comes as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced Thursday that it had started a study of this vaccine developed by the Moscow research center Gamaleïa, a key step for its deployment in Europe.
Figures released by Putin during a meeting with volunteers in the Kremlin, however, show that authorities still have a long way to go in persuading 146 million residents to get vaccinated, around a month and a half after the start of the campaign. 'a mass vaccination campaign in mid-January.
"
More than two million people have received the two doses of the vaccine to date,
" said Putin, according to images broadcast on public television.
"
And just over two million received the first injection,
" he added.
This is about 1.3% of the Russian population.
Nearly two-thirds of Russians believe that Covid-19 is a man-made '
biological weapon
',
according to a survey published this week by independent center Levada
, and 62% of those surveyed are unwilling to be vaccinated with Sputnik V. For his part, Vladimir Poutine, 68, who has not been officially vaccinated to date, once again defended on Thursday the Russian vaccines "
the safest and most effective in the world
".
Named after the first Soviet satellite, Sputnik V, Russia's first vaccine against the coronavirus, was approved in August.
Its 91.6% effectiveness was confirmed in February in a study published by the medical journal The Lancet, validated by independent experts.
The second Russian vaccine, EpiVacCorona, was licensed in October.
And at the end of February, the country announced that it had registered its third vaccine, Covivac.
Russia has officially recorded 4,290,135 cases of coronavirus to date, including 87,823 deaths, mortality figures much lower than those recorded at the same time by the Russian statistical services.
