Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that Russia has registered the world's first vaccine for coronavirus.
Despite earlier scepticism from health experts and a warning from the World Health Organization to follow established protocols, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko declared that the vaccine was "proven to be highly effective and safe" and Mr Putin said it had "passed all the required checks".
The minister added that trials of the vaccine would continue, involving thousands of people.
Mr Putin said one of his daughters had used the vaccine, and that she was fine after having had an increase in temperature.
Many other vaccines are currently undergoing trials in a number of countries. Earlier this month, US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said he hoped Russia was "actually testing the vaccine" before giving it to anyone.
My initial thoughts were that they might have used... ehm... ethically questionable trials. No clue, honestly. Let's hope it's just what they announce, it would be a massive feat.
Hmm, I'm putting this in here with a pretty big caveat. I'm guessing they must have used challenge trials to push this through so quickly.
We shall see over the coming weeks and months. Progress on vaccines in general is good news, however.
Hmm, I'm putting this in here with a pretty big caveat. I'm guessing they must have used challenge trials to push this through so quickly.
We shall see over the coming weeks and months. Progress on vaccines in general is good news, however.
This guy speaks a lot of sense and I consider what he says very reliable.
“We were just fortunate that the coronavirus was very close to MERS, so we pretty much had a ready-to-go vaccine on MERS, studied for two years on MERS (and) slightly modified to be the coronavirus vaccine, and that is the real story, no politics ... Russia has always been at the forefront of vaccine research,” Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund RDIF, which is backing the vaccine, told CNBC.
The world is certain to have a coronavirus vaccine in 2021, if not within the next few months, the German health minister has said. “Thanks to us all working together – researchers, scientists, the public – we will probably have a vaccine faster than ever before in the history of humanity,” Jens Spahn added.