US health secretary casts doubts over credibility of Russia's Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik

AMERICAN health officials have expressed scepticism over the efficacy of the new Covid-19 vaccine Russian scientists claim to have developed saying that there is not enough available data from its clinical trials to convince them it works.

Yesterday, Russia became the first country in the world to grant regulatory approval to a Covid-19 vaccine after less than two months of human testing. Named Sputnik, the vaccine developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute, has been hailed by President Vladimir Putin as safe, who said that it had even been administered on one of his daughters.

This drug's approval by the health ministry foreshadows the start of a larger trial involving thousands of participants, commonly known as a Phase III trial. Such trials, which require a certain rate of participants catching the virus to observe the vaccine’s effect, are normally considered essential precursors for a vaccine to receive regulatory approval.

However, the US health chief expressed scepticism about the vaccine, pointing to the lack of data from its initial trials. Western scientists have raised concerns about the development speed of Russian treatments, suggesting researchers were cutting corners and now US health secretary Alex Azar, has echoed those concerns.

Mr Azar said: “It’s important that we provide safe, effective vaccines and that the data be transparent. This is not a race to be first and I should note that two of the six US vaccines that we’ve invested in entered the phase three clinical trials weeks ago and the Russian vaccine is now only beginning.

"Data from the initial trials of the vaccine in Russia have not been disclosed. It’s not transparent.”

Russian scientists decided to name the vaccine Sputnik, after the world’s first artificial satellite that helped the Soviet Union take the lead in the Cold War space race in 1957. Governments are under huge pressure to find a vaccine against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 700,000 people worldwide and eviscerated the global economy since it first emerged in central China late last year.

America is the worst-hit country, with nearly 5.1m infections and more than 163,000 deaths. President Donald Trump is facing a tough fight to get re-elected in November, trailing rival Joe Biden in the polls as anger mounts over his administration’s response to the pandemic.

However, Mr Azar said: “We believe that it is highly credible that we will have in the high tens of millions of doses of gold-standard, safe and effective vaccines by the end of this year and many hundreds of millions of doses as we go into the beginning of next year.”

President Trump has launched Operation Warp Speed, which aims to develop, manufacture and distribute a coronavirus vaccine to all Americans by January 2021. So far, Washington has handed out at least $9.4bn to seven vaccine developers and signed manufacturing contracts with five of them to provide 700m doses.

Mr Azar’s Taiwan trip was billed as an opportunity to learn from the island’s success in containing the virus. Taiwan has reported fewer than 500 infections and just seven Covid-19 deaths.