MOSCOW, April 1./TASS/. Russia expects that European Union leadership will stop making inadmissible untrue statements about the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Thursday, listing some statements from certain European politicians about the Russian vaccine.
"We expect that the EU leadership is fully aware of responsibility for the life and health of EU nationals amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and that it will be moving away from such inadmissible, false and unseemly statements," the diplomat said.
The spokeswoman emphasized that unlike the EU, Russia is not applying ‘vaccine nationalism’ amid the shortage of production capabilities, but seeks to ensure access to the Russian vaccine for all who will ask for it in any part of the globe.
"We are not imposing anything on anyone, we are not forcing anyone to do anything, but we are open for cooperation," she summed up.
Russia was the world’s first to register an anti-coronavirus vaccine on August 11, 2020. The vaccine, developed by the Russian Health Ministry’s Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, was dubbed Sputnik V. It is a vector vaccine based on the human adenovirus.
In early February 2020, The Lancet, a world-acclaimed medical journal, published the results of the third phase of Sputnik V’s clinical tests. The jab has proved to be among the world’s safest and most efficient. Thus, its efficacy is estimated at 91.6% and 91.8% among volunteers older than 60. Ninety-eight percent of volunteers developed antibodies to the coronavirus.
For now, the European Union has approved the use of four vaccines, namely, BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.