Volunteers in Russia's Sputnik V trials to no longer receive placebos: Report
A medical worker fills a syringe with Sputnik V (Gam-COVID-Vac) vaccine as she prepares to vaccinate a Russian Army service member at a clinic in the city of Rostov-On-Don, Russia December 22, 2020
The Gamaleya Institute in Moscow which developed the Sputnik V, Russia’s first vaccine against COVID-19 on Wednesday claimed that volunteers in its final-stage trials for the vaccine will no longer receive placebos.
The vaccine is now undergoing large-scale trials in the final stage to ascertain the safety imbued in the vaccine - which was touted as the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine by Russian authorities.
A few months ago, reports started emerging about the vaccine being given to top players in Russian administration, including President Putin’s daughter.
The RIA news agency reported that placebos will no longer be part of the trial. In every vaccine trial, placebos are used to ensure no false results are logged.
The director of Gamaleya Institute - Alexander Ginsburg said that the Health Ministry has officially ended the usage of placebos on the recruits for the most crucial and the final stages of trials.
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Also read:AstraZeneca signs memorandum of cooperation with Russia's Sputnik V to combine COVID-19 vaccine
"Everything there has been proven and the pandemic is ongoing, so a placebo is not good at all," Ginsburg said, as reported by RIA.
The institute chief added how he would like to identify people who had been given the placebo, but added that it’s unclear whether “the regulator” would “allow this”.
Earlier this month, Russia rolled out the Sputnik V vaccine for healthcare workers among others on the frontline of fighting the virus.
Reuters claims that over 200,000 people in the country have already been inoculated. Data from the ongoing trials which was published last week shed light on the success rates of Sputnik V.
Russia had received criticism for approving the vaccine after less than two months of human testing August. But data claims that the vaccine is 91.4 per cent effective in fighting COVID-19.
Breaking protocol, the regulators did not wait for the results of stage-3 trials before allowing emergency use authorisation. In usual circumstances, many volunteers receive the vaccine or the placebo. They are not told which one has been given to them. Once enough people get infected in the natural environment, the infection rates are ascertained, and so is the success rate.