officials in and around Moscow (where the vaccine has been made available first) have been administering the shots to virtually anyone who wants one, learned Meduza special correspondents Svetlana Reiter and Liliya Yapparova, who also discovered a special chat group on Telegram that contains instructions explaining how to get Sputnik V, even if you’re not in a risk group.
Sputnik V’s chief developer, Denis Logunov, told Meduza that the vaccine still hasn’t completed its Phase III trial, meaning that it cannot yet be made available to the general public. The drug currently has only “limited” approval, which allows health officials to vaccinate only people in certain risk groups, Logunov explained.
So far, the only published data from Sputnik V’s completed clinical trials come from the vaccine’s combined Phase I-II trial and its 20 participants. “We have no [detailed, published] data on how this vaccine will affect the body, shall we say, in the long run,” says Svetlana Zavidova, the executive director of the nonprofit Association of Clinical Trials Organizations. “And we still have no data about the drug’s effectiveness. We can’t even assess the risk of widescale use,” she warns.
In and around Moscow, mass vaccinations against COVID-19 are already underway. Doctors, teachers, and others in risk groups, however, aren’t being prioritized — the shots are going to anyone who wants them.
Source: A ‘restricted’ free-for-all Russia’s coronavirus vaccine is rolling out in Moscow to risk groups, but hospitals are actually inoculating anyone who wants it, due to low demand driven by safety concerns — Meduza
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