Sputnik Light has 70% Delta efficacy: RDIF

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has claimed that its Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik Light, a single dose shot or the first dose component of Sputnik V, shows 70 per cent efficacy against the Delta variant of the Sarscov-2 virus. In people under 60 years, the vaccine is even more effective at 75 per cent, the RDIF said.

The developer of the vaccine, Gamaleya Center, has submitted its analysis of the efficacy of Sputnik Light against the Delta variant to the medrxiv preprint server for health sciences for publication this week.

“Sputnik Light has demonstrated a superior efficacy compared with some two-shot vaccines, which have shown a major decline in the efficacy against the Delta variant to less than 50 per cent five months after injection,” said Kirill Dimitriev, CEO of RDIF, while interacting with the media from Moscow.

Standalone use of Sputnik Light also provides much higher efficacy against severe disease and hospitalisations, RDIF claimed. “The analysis was conducted based on data from 28,000 participants who had received a single dose of Sputnik Light, compared with a control group of 5.6 million individuals who were not vaccinated. The data used in the study was collected in July 2021 in Moscow,” it said in a statement.

The two-dose Sputnik V vaccine shows efficacy over 83 per cent against infection and over 94 per cent against hospitalisation.

Dimitriev said that Sputnik Light can thus act as a booster shot for even those who have been vaccinated with other vaccines like MRNA candidates. “We are working with Astrazeneca, Sinopharm, and Moderna to test a mix-and-match approach of two different vaccines.”

RDIF has 20 manufacturing partners across 10 countries and almost 50 per cent of the Sputnik vaccine production happens outside Russia.

As such in India, the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) under the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation has recommended the conduct of Phase III clinical trials of Russia’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik Light in September.