Russia seems determined to roll out its Covid-19 vaccine “Sputnik-V” without conducting full trials. Virus experts have expressed their concerns about Russia’s roll out plan, warning that this vaccine may be only partially effective. This means the vaccine may end up encouraging the novel coronavirus to mutate.
Viruses, including the pandemic SARS-CoV-2, keep mutating all the time. Most of the time, this mutation has little effect on the health of people.
But some scientists are worried that adding “evolutionary pressure” to the pathogen by deploying what might not be a fully protective vaccine could make things worse.
“Less than complete protection could provide a selection pressure that drives the virus to evade what antibody there is, creating strains that then evade all vaccine responses,” said Ian Jones, a virology professor at Britain’s Reading University.
“In that sense, a poor vaccine is worse than no vaccine.”
Russian authorities as well as Sputnik-V’s developers they all have brushed aside these concerns. They have not shared any data either with the WTO or any global health agency. All they say is that the vaccine is safe and that two months of small-scale human trials have shown that it works.
Nobody knows when these trials were conducted. Scientists are sceptical. Many of them have issued warning against its use until all internationally approved testing and regulatory hurdles have been passed.
Meanwhile, Russia has announced to launch what it says a large-scale efficacy trial of the vaccine. The trial will be done on 40,000 people. The proposed vaccine will also be administered to people in high-risk groups. These groups include healthcare workers.
“You want to make sure the vaccine is effective. We really don’t know that (about the Sputnik vaccine),” said Kathryn Edwards, a professor of paediatrics and vaccine expert in the infectious diseases division at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in the United States.
She said that the risk of what a vaccine might do to a virus – in terms of fighting it, blocking it, or forcing it to adapt – is “always a concern”.
