Coronavirus vaccine: US raises doubts over Russia’s Sputnik V

The US has hosed down news of a Russian coronavirus vaccine with doubts it is safe, as the two countries race to be the first with a drug.

Top US health officials have questioned the safety of Russia’s coronavirus vaccine and say they will have doses ready by the end of the year.

US Health Secretary Alex Azar said America was actually ahead of Russia in its trials, while the country’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, said he seriously doubted the Sputnik V vaccine had proven safe and effective.

Mr Azar said two of the US vaccines entered phase three clinical trials “weeks ago”.

“And the Russian vaccine is now only beginning that,” he said, while likening their vaccine development to the Apollo moon mission.

“The data from the initial trials has not been disclosed, it’s not transparent.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his country had registered a vaccine for coronavirus yesterday and claimed his own daughter had received it.

“I know that it works quite effectively, forms strong immunity, and I repeat, it has passed all the needed checks,” he said.

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Russia’s vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. Picture: Russian Direct Investment Fund

The vaccine was developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute and had less than two months of human testing, with phase three trials launched last week.

There had been calls for Russia to put off registering the vaccine until its trials were complete.

Mr Azar said development was not about a race to be first.

“This is using every power of the US government, its economy and its biopharmaceuticals, and harnessing that to deliver a vaccine as quickly as we can for the benefit of the United States citizens but also for the people of the world,” he said.

He said the US had six vaccines under contract.

“We believe that it is highly credible that we will have in the high tens of millions of doses of gold safety standard vaccine by the end of this year and many hundreds of millions of doses as we go into the beginning of next year,” he said.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his country had registered a coronavirus vaccine. Picture: Alexey Nikolsky/AFP

Dr Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said having a vaccine and proving it was safe and effective was two different things.

“I hope that the Russians have actually, definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they’ve done that,” he told ABC News.

“We have half a dozen or more vaccines. So if we wanted to take the chance of hurting a lot of people or giving them something that doesn‘t work, we could start doing this, you know, next week if we wanted to. But that’s not the way it works.”

According to the World Health Organisation, there are 28 vaccines in human trials around the world.

The organisation said it had been in touch with Russian scientists and authorities and looked forward to reviewing details of the trial.

Meanwhile, Australian experts have also questioned the efficacy of Russia’s vaccine.

“Russia’s move to large scale manufacture before phase 3 trials have been completed has been described as reckless and unethical and may represent a mixture of anxiety and desperation to control an increasing number of cases and deaths caused by SARS-CoV-2,” Dr Roger Lord, medical sciences lecturer at The Australian Catholic University said.

“Conversely, marketing the vaccine as Sputnik V does suggest a propaganda exercise at a time when results are being reported for other vaccine candidates, which are in more advanced stages of development such as the Oxford vaccine.”

Professor Nigel McMillan, Director in Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Menzies Health Institute Queensland, said it was impossible to know that the vaccine even gave any protection against COVID-19, let alone how long protection would last.

“This is vaccine nationalism at play (the Sputnik V name says it all) and the danger here is that if there are issues going forward with this vaccine, in terms of efficacy or safety, it will put the entire vaccine effort in a very difficult position, as people will lose trust or hope that any vaccine will work.“