The New Your Times12 Aug 2020 08:26
Russia’s vaccine gamble
Russia announced today that it had approved a vaccine for the coronavirus, the first country in the world to do so. But the claim has been met with international skepticism because the vaccine has not been thoroughly tested.
Vaccines generally go through three stages of human testing before they are approved. The first two phases test the vaccine on small numbers of people to see if it stimulates an immune response without harm. In the final phase — known as Phase 3 — the vaccine is compared to a placebo and is given to thousands of people.
Our colleague Carl Zimmer, who covers science for The Times, told us that a large-scale trial was the only way to know with any certainty that a vaccine would work, and it would help identify subtle side effects that might have been missed in smaller studies.
The Russian vaccine, known as Sputnik-V, has not yet entered Phase 3, and scientific data from its earlier trails has not been published. Still, the health minister said that the country would begin vaccinating teachers and health workers this month, followed by a mass vaccination campaign in the fall.
“That’s like taking a plane up in the sky, claiming that it works, when you’ve never actually taken a test flight,” Carl told us. “Maybe it will work, or maybe you’ll crash into the ground.”
Western regulators don’t expect a vaccine to become widely available before the end of the year at the earliest. President Vladimir Putin’s rush to announce the vaccine is raising concerns that Russia is cutting corners in order to gain propaganda points.
“Vaccine experts have been warning about this kind of political grandstanding for months now,” Carl said. “Vaccines are among the safest medicines in history. But if someone just decides to skip some vital parts of the process and put out a vaccine that doesn’t work, you can raise doubts in people’s minds about other vaccines. And if people don’t trust vaccines, they may not take them.”
The Times’s Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker monitors vaccines that have reached trials in humans, along with a selection that are still being tested in cells or animals.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
