Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Russia: 1.5 MIn Receive Sputnik-V Vaccine Around World


Mon 11 Jan 2021 | 08:55 PM
Ezzeldin Essam Ezzeldin

Russia announced, Monday, that 1.5 million people around the world have received the "Sputnik-V" vaccine, which Moscow developed against the novel coronavirus.

Arseniy Palagin, a spokesman for the Russian sovereign fund, which financed the development of the vaccine, confirmed this number, without giving details regarding the ratios of people who were vaccinated in the various countries that requested the Russian vaccine, according to the French news agency.

Palagin explained: "We cannot determine how many people received it in Moscow and how many in the rest of the world."

In August, Moscow was the first country in the world to register a vaccine against COVID-19.

Last week, the Russian Minister of Health, Mikhail Murashko, confirmed that 800,000 citizens had been vaccinated and 1.5 million doses had been distributed in the country.

On Sunday, Murashko revealed to Russian television that there were talks with the World Health Organization (WHO) to include "Sputnik-V" in the list of vaccines that can be used in emergencies.

The minister believed that this will facilitate the procedures for registering the vaccine and using it in WHO campaigns in countries that find difficulties to obtain a vaccine.

Moscow is facing a second wave of Coronavirus, but the authorities are refusing to impose any new lockdown at the national level.

The figures published by the authorities daily show that 3.42 million people have been infected since the outbreak of the pandemic and more than 62 thousand died, but this toll only records deaths whose direct cause was confirmed to be the Coronavirus, after an autopsy.