Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the sovereign wealth fund that backed development of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, announced Monday that companies in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany have made agreements to produce the vaccine “once approval is granted” by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
Radio Free Europe (RFE) noted that Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have already ordered doses of the Russian vaccine candidate. Dmitriev said Sputnik V has been “registered in more than 50 countries” and has been used by some 3.5 million Russians to date.
Dmitriev heads the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the state-owned fund that bankrolled the Sputnik V project at Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow. He said in January that he wanted a “non-political” approach to distributing the Russian inoculation, which he predicted would become “one of the most widely accepted vaccines in the world.”
RDIF quickly filed applications for approval from medical agencies around the world, including Europe’s EMA, but notably excluding the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA). RDIF said it saw little point in trying to compete for the U.S. coronavirus vaccine market.
“Russia is leading in Europe by the number of full vaccination courses against the coronavirus infection completed,” Dmitriev stated Monday.
“Together with China, the US, India, and Israel, Russia is in the top five globally in terms of the number of people that got fully vaccinated” he elaborated. “This indicator is often incorrectly compared to a total number of shots administered, whereas Russia uses a more conservative method based on full vaccination with two components.”
EuroNews noted Monday that Italian-Swiss pharma company Adienne has announced an agreement to begin producing Sputnik V in July. RDIF did not name the French, German, and Spanish companies with which it has secured production agreements, but said it expects to sell at least 50 million doses to Europeans over the summer.
The European Union (EU) has publicly dismissed Russia’s vaccine as hastily designed and poorly tested, more effective as a propaganda instrument than an inoculation against Chinese coronavirus.
“We should not let ourselves be misled by China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they organise highly limited but widely publicised operations to supply vaccines to others. Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes,” European Council president Charles Michel said last week.
Reuters reported Monday that, despite these prior denunciations, the Europeans are grudgingly beginning to consider partnerships with Russia to fill its shortfalls in vaccine supply. Two unnamed EU officials said Italy is considering devoting its largest vaccine bioreactor to manufacturing Sputnik V. Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, is urging the EU to broaden its portfolio of vaccines and include the Russian product as one of its options.
“If Sputnik V were to join the EU’s vaccine arsenal, it would be a diplomatic triumph for Russia, whose trade with the bloc has been hamstrung for years by sanctions over its annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine,” Reuters observed.
The Moscow Times reported that Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) president Rik Daems spoke with Russian parliamentary speaker Vyacheslav Volodin on Monday about purchasing a supply of Sputnik V.
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