Russia Claims COVID-19 Vaccine is 92 Percent Effective

The battle for a COVID-19 vaccine heats up as Western and Eastern drugmakers claim their vaccines are at least 90 percent effective. (Wikimedia Commons)

The developers of Sputnik V, Russia’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine, claimed that it is 92 percent effective in protecting people from the coronavirus. After Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the approval of a second COVID-19 vaccine weeks following the first in mid-October, many scientists questioned both vaccines’ speedy approvals and true efficacy.

Russia’s announcement followed a major breakthrough in the United States’ search for a COVID-19 vaccine. In a press release, Pfizer Inc., an U.S. pharmaceutical corporation, stated that they tested a vaccine developed with German biotechnology company BioNTech and that it achieved a 90 percent efficacy rate in preventing the spread of COVID-19 among thousands of participants in Phase 3 clinical trials. 

In a statement published on the Sputnik V website, early results from Sputnik V’s Phase 3 trials showed that its efficacy was “based on the 20 confirmed Covid-19 cases split between vaccinated individuals and those who received the placebo.”

Although the alleged efficacy rate was based on only 20 volunteers, the statement noted that “40,000 volunteers are taking part in double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled Phase III of Sputnik V clinical trials, out of which over 20,000 have been vaccinated with the first dose of the vaccine and more than 16,000 with both the first and second doses of the vaccine.”

The battle for a COVID-19 vaccine with Western drugmakers prompted Putin to warn against the politicization of the process before assuring that he would cooperate with other countries to develop a vaccine. He also announced that the country was working on a third vaccine.

“I assume there was political pressure after the press release from Pfizer and BioNTech earlier in the week to now draw level with their own data,” said Bodo Plachter, Deputy Director of the Institute of Virology at the Mainz University. “What is missing for now is an analysis of statistical significance.”

Despite being the first country to register a COVID-19 vaccine, Russia has been wracked with thousands of cases and currently faces the possibility of a lockdown. Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, ordered all bars, restaurants, clubs, and other nighttime establishments to close between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. to slow the spread of the coronavirus; the curfew will be instituted from November 13 to January 15, 2021. The country has reached nearly 2 million total cases and almost 33,000 deaths. Russia currently ranks fifth in the world in total case numbers.