A photograph taken on December 4, 2020 shows the production of the Russian vaccine against the Gam-COVID-Vac coronavirus.
OLGA MALTSEVA | AFP | Getty Images
LONDON – Cooperation between vaccine manufacturers will increase in 2021, according to the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, which welcomed the recent announcement of a combined trial for the two candidates Russia and the UK will develop.
“I think next year will be the era of vaccine cooperation rather than vaccine competition,” Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which supports the Covid vaccine, told CNBC on Thursday. of the country called “Sputnik V”.
Last Friday, British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said it would soon begin working with Russia’s Gamaleya Institute to investigate whether its two blows could be successfully combined.
RDIF said clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine in combination with its own would begin in late December. Dmitriev told CNBC on Thursday that the link was a “great example of a vaccine partnership.”
“I think the world should focus on partnership rather than competition because we need all the vaccines to be successful.”
“We believe all the vaccines out there are excellent and will have good results,” he added.
For its part, AstraZeneca (whose vaccine was found to have an average efficacy of 70.4%, based on the combination of two dosing regimens in end-stage clinical trials), said in a statement that combining different Covid-19 vaccines may be helpful in improving protection and / or improving accessibility to vaccines, so it is important to explore different vaccine combinations to help make vaccination programs more flexible. “
Russia said earlier this week that data from the third and final checkpoint of the final phase clinical trial of its vaccine showed that its candidate has a rate of effectiveness in preventing infection by Covid, 91.4%.
Dmitriev said the link to AstraZeneca could help “improve the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
He believed other vaccine manufacturers would also start cooperating to check “the interoperability of different vaccines.”
There has been international skepticism about Russia’s vaccine, as the country’s regulators had approved it (in August), even before final-stage clinical trials began.
Data from clinical trials should also not be published. On Monday, Russian vaccine creators said the data from the trial investigation “will be published by the Gamaleya Center team in one of the most peer-reviewed international medical journals,” but did not say when that might be the case.
Russia has repeatedly said criticism of its vaccine is due to the “information war” and Russophobia. Last week, a spokesman for Russia’s defense ministry said there had been a “defamation campaign” against Russia’s vaccine, the TASS news agency reported.
The collaboration with AstraZeneca is even more interesting as the UK, US and Canada accused Russia of supporting hackers trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research. Russia vehemently denied the allegations of piracy.
– CNBC’s Sam Meredith contributed to this report.