Britain unlikely to accept Russian jab
BRITAIN would be likely to reject a potentially game-changing coronavirus vaccine from Russia amid strong reservations about the trial process there, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
That approach chimes with the US, where Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease official, raised doubts about the testing regimes for potential vaccines in Russia and China.
Russia has claimed it is close to rolling out the world’s first vaccine against Covid-19. Moscow has boasted it is a “Sputnik moment” (when the Soviet Union astonished the US by launching a satellite into space in 1957).
Mikhail Murashko, Russia’s health minister, said yesterday that the Gamaleya Institute, a state research facility, had completed clinical trials.
Doctors and teachers would be the first to be vaccinated. “We plan wider vaccinations for October,” Mr Murashko said.
But Dr Fauci told a Congressional hearing on Friday that it was unlikely the US would make use of either a Russian or Chinese vaccine if they became available first. He also predicted that an American vaccine would be available by the end of the year.
Three Western vaccines are in final phase-three trials. One is produced by US biotech firm Moderna and the National Institutes of Health; one by the University of Oxford and Britain’s AstraZeneca; the last by Germany’s BioNTech with US pharmaceutical Pfizer.
Dr Fauci said: “I do hope that the Chinese and the Russians are actually testing the vaccine before they are administering [it]. We are going very quickly. I do not believe that there will be vaccines, so far ahead of us, that we will have to depend on other countries to get us vaccines.”
Britain takes a similar view. One source said: “We would use a vaccine if we trusted the data.” Crucially, it depended on how open the Russians or Chinese were, the source said.
Russia has released no scientific data proving the vaccine’s safety or efficacy. Details of the British vaccine have already been published in The Lancet.
Public health experts are clear it would be impossible for Britain to accept a vaccine from another country without all internationally recognised protocols being met.
Azeem Majeed, professor of primary care at Imperial College London, said: “We have strict and rigorous processes. It is unthinkable that the Government would relax those rules.”
Prof Majeed said some countries might be tempted to turn a blind eye.
Chinese media last month announced a vaccine was being used to immunise its military – making it the first approved for people.
‘I do hope that the Chinese and the Russians are actually testing the vaccine before administering it’