MOSCOW, July 23. /TASS/. Reports alleging that some Russian business people and politicians were inoculated against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus this spring are a myth, Russian Federation Council (upper house of parliament) Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said on Thursday.

"As far as I know the vaccine is first tested on mice. Then there are clinical trials on volunteers," she said. "I do not know any cases when someone could have been vaccinated, since the first two candidate vaccines, which have already undergone clinical trials, appeared quite recently. I wonder if there are individuals who are ready to have [the vaccine] tested on themselves before elementary trials. It is one of the myths, in my opinion, devised to claim that officials are such so-and-so that they had even been injected with the vaccine before the others. Of course, no," Matviyenko said at a news conference.

Bloomberg reported earlier that Russian business people and politicians were vaccinated back in April. Russia’s Health Ministry dismissed the reports.

According to Matviyenko, the pace of vaccine development proves that Russia has the most powerful medical potential.

Reviewing the government’s performance at the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said that four candidate vaccines had already proven to be safe. Moreover, clinical trials for two more candidate vaccines, which are being developed by the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, are at their final stage, he said.

In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 15,382,800 people have been infected worldwide and more than 630,300 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 9,357,600 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.

To date, 795,038 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 580,330 patients having recovered from the disease. Russia’s latest data indicates 12,892 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.