More than 40,000 doses of the EpiVacCorona COVID-19 vaccine have entered civilian circulation, Acting Deputy Director General of the Vector State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology Tatiana Nepomnyashchikh told Russia’s Channel One television on Thursday.
“To date, slightly over 40,000 doses [of the EpiVacCorona vaccine] have entered civilian circulation. They have been delivered to a large number of Russian regions,” she said, as reported by TASS.
Nepomnyashchikh added that the research center planned to manufacture from 100,000 to 150,000 vaccine doses per month. According to the official, about 1 million vaccine doses will be produced by its industrial partners.
“We have a clear-cut plan for scaling up production, which will enable us to manufacture about 400,000 [vaccine] doses in February and reach the overall production of 1 million doses by the end of March and make more than 4 million doses per month by the end of the half-year period,” she added.
Head of the Vector center’s Zoonotic Infections and Influenza Department Alexander Ryzhikov earlier said that the center would be able to manufacture up to 5 million coronavirus vaccine doses per year.
On July 24, 2020, the Vector research center received the Russian Health Ministry’s permit for clinical trials of its coronavirus vaccine on volunteers. They ended on September 30. On October 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the vaccine developed by Vector had received a registration certificate. On November 16, the Health Ministry issued a permit for post-registration trials of the vaccine on volunteers over the age of 60, and a permit for trials on 3,000 volunteers aged from 18 to 60 was issued on November 18.
