Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has joined hands with Indian pharma company Hetero Labs for producing over 100 million doses per year of the world’s first registered vaccine against Covid-19, Sputnik V covid vaccine in India.
On November 24, RDIF had announced positive results obtained from Phase III clinical trials in Russia during the interim data analysis of the largest double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials involving 40,000 volunteers. The Russian wealth fund said that the production of Sputnik V covid vaccine is expected to start in the beginning of the year 2021.
B. Murali Krishna Reddy, Director – International Marketing, Hetero Labs Ltd. said, “We are pleased to collaborate with RDIF as a manufacturing partner for the most anticipated Sputnik V vaccine for the treatment of Covid-19. While we look forward to the clinical trial results in India, we believe that manufacturing the product locally is crucial to enable swift access to patients”.
Since November 9, four drugmakers have announced that their vaccines are more effective than 90 per cent against the deadly coronavirus disease. Firstly, the US-German collaborated pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech start-up BioNTech announced their vaccines to be 90 per cent effective and later from the reports of Phase 3 results it is found to be 95 per cent effective. Following the Pfizer’s announcement, US firm Moderna Inc. and a British partnership between AstraZeneca and Oxford University announced the results of their Phase 3 clinical trials claiming that their vaccines are 90 per cent more effective against coronavirus.