"The vaccine developer has yet to complete clinical trials, raising international concern about the methods the country is using to compete in the global race to inoculate the public.
The minister of health, Mikhail Murashko, said Saturday that the plan was to begin by vaccinating teachers and health care workers. He also told the RIA state news agency that amid accelerated testing, the laboratory that developed the vaccine was already seeking regulatory approval for it.
Russia is one of a number of countries rushing to develop and administer a vaccine. Not only would such a vaccine help alleviate a worldwide health crisis that has killed more than 680,000 people and badly wounded the global economy, it would also become a symbol of national pride. And Russia has used the race as a propaganda tool, even in the absence of published scientific evidence to support its claim as a front-runner.
“I do hope that the Chinese and the Russians are actually testing the vaccine before they are administering the vaccine to anyone,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, warned a congressional hearing on Friday.
State television in Russia has for several months now promoted the idea of Russia leading the competition. In May, a government report claimed that the first person in the world to be vaccinated against the virus was a Russian researcher who had injected himself with a vaccine early in the development process.
Russia will start Phase III trials of the vaccine in early August, said Kirill Dmitriev, a senior official with Russia Direct Investment Fund, a government-controlled investor in the country’s vaccination effort. A Phase III trial is the only way to determine if a vaccine is effective.
The Russian vaccine was developed by the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow. It uses two strains of adenovirus that typically cause mild colds in humans. Adenovirus vaccines are in trials in various countries. They are genetically modified to cause infected cells to make proteins from the spike of the new coronavirus.
The Gamaleya Institute tested its vaccine on soldiers, raising ethical questions about consent, though the defense ministry said all of the soldiers had volunteered. The institute’s director, Aleksandr Gintsberg, went on television in May to say he tried the vaccine on himself before announcing the completion of trials in monkeys.
Mr. Dmitriev, of the Russia Direct Investment Fund, has attributed Russia’s research success to the Soviet Union’s once-formidable scientific study of viruses.
“We have this very significant legacy of Russia being a leader of vaccines in the Soviet time and today,” he said. “We don’t have to create many things from scratch.”
“In the last 20 years, the world took a turn toward molecular biology,” said Aydar A. Ishmukhametov, the director of the Chumakov Institute, a Russian vaccine maker. “The Russian school has preserved virology.”
The science of mass producing vaccines has deep roots here. Aleksei Chumakov, a virologist and son of the founder of the Chumakov Institute, recalled a summer job he held as a teenager chopping up kidneys harvested from African green monkeys. Even though the monkeys had been slaughtered, Mr. Chumakov said, their kidney cells lived on for many months, used to grow the polio virus in large, rotating glass cylinders.
“You kept stirring it and gradually the clumps came apart,” he said.
As scientists gained proficiency in growing so-called immortal cell lines — human or animal cells that are modified to divide indefinitely — they replaced cultures from fresh monkey kidneys.
The Chumakov Institute has also used an immortal monkey kidney cell line from 1962 to grow coronavirus for a proposed second vaccine using whole, inactivated viruses, which may be used as an alternative if the vaccine targeting just the spike protein fails.
The Gamaleya Institute developed its vaccine using a human cell line first cultured in 1973, known as Hek293 — the same line used in the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine."
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