US refuses Russia’s help with vaccine

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Russia offered to help the United States develop a coronavirus vaccine, but the US turned it down, CNN reported Thursday.
• Russia announced Tuesday that it became the first country to approve a COVID-19 vaccine they called Sputnik V.
• American scientists say the development of Russia’s vaccine was rushed, compromising its safety and effectiveness.

Russia is claiming that the U.S. refused the help it is offering with the development of the coronavirus vaccine.

Russian officials told CNN that they offered “unprecedented cooperation” with the U.S.’s Operation Warp Speed, the initiative to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The officials said the “U.S. is not currently open” to their offer.

“There is a general sense of mistrust of Russia on the American side,” a senior Russian official told the network, “and we believe that technologies — including vaccine, testing and treatments — are not being adopted in US because of that mistrust,”

According to U.S. officials, Russia’s vaccine is not well-developed. One public health official even said, “There’s no way in hell the US tries this (Russian vaccine) on monkeys, let alone people.”

On Tuesday, Russia announced that its COVID-19 vaccine named Sputnik V has been approved and ready to use. Russian President Vladimir Putin bragged that it is the first country to do so and said his daughter had taken it.

Russian officials said the U.S. should “seriously consider adopting” the vaccine.

“If our vaccine proves to be one of the most effective, questions will be asked why the US did not explore this option any deeper, why politics got in way of access to a vaccine,” one senior Russian official told CNN.

Health experts have expressed doubts about the safety and effectiveness of Russia’s vaccine as the nation has not released its testing data and made the vaccine ready for use before completing the third phase of testing.

Russia said that at least 20 countries in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia have shown interest in Sputnik V.

A senior American official and adviser to the government told CNN the U.S. does not have any procured samples of the Russian vaccine.

“They have enough disease now in Russia that they could conduct clinical trials but they don’t appear to have done that at a large enough scale,” the adviser said. “There have been no trials of this vaccine. They’ve done too little work on humans to decide if it works on a larger scale. We’re talking totally inadequate safety data.”

Source: The Hill