Russia's New COVID Vaccine Generates Strong Immune Response BY RICK MORAN SEP 05, 2020 10:10 AM EST
AP Photo/Hans Pennink
According to a study in The Lancet medical journal, Russia’s new coronavirus vaccine—named “Sputnik V”— has shown promising results in the early stages of human trials.
The vaccine apparently generates a strong immune response in test subjects with minimal side effects. As The Lancet points out, this doesn’t necessarily mean the vaccine is effective. The study was small — only 76 people — and confirmation awaits large-scale trials involving thousands of people.
The vaccine induced a strong immune response in all 76 participants. Presumably these results were available to the Russian Ministry of Health. For regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency, however, data on immune response alone would not generally be an adequate basis for approving a vaccine. “Immune response might not be directly proportional to the degree of protection—you can only find this out in large-scale trials”, explains Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London (London, UK).
But many researchers are cautious and question the mass production of the vaccine. The Kremlin says Russia will start to produce the vaccine in large quantities this month and can manufacture 500 million doses a year.
“We have no idea whether this vaccine is safe or whether it works”, cautions Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health (Providence, RI, USA). “It is really worrying when people start to bypass the standard process we have for vaccine development.” Those behind the Russian vaccine have offered a combative response to such criticism. The official website was established with the stated aim to “provide accurate and up-to-date information about Sputnik V and to combat the misinformation campaign launched against it in the international media”.
The human body may basically be the same, and the differences from person to person may be small, but those differences can mean life or death for some people. Without large-scale human trials, we’re in the dark about what percentage of the population might be sensitive to the vaccine’s ingredients. In the vast majority of cases, mild side effects like fever, muscle aches, headache, and diarrhea can be expected in a relatively small percentage of subjects. More serious side effects are even rarer, but may be life-threatening.
It would be an amazing achievement — and extremely lucky — if the Russian vaccine were to be safe and effective for the vast majority of subjects.
But CNN reports an abnormally high number of vaccine recipients reporting side effects.
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Poster Comment:
Let's see the results of trials.