BUENOS AIRES, February 8. /TASS/. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on Sunday that in his opinion Russia’s Sputnik V anti-coronavirus vaccine is the safest.

"I do not want to say anything bad about other vaccines," he said in a video message on his Twitter account. "I am only saying good thigs about the vaccine, which by means of tests here proved to be the safest."

"Today, everyone in the world starts agreeing that Sputnik V is the best and safest vaccine," Maduro said. "We have been speaking about this since August."

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said in December that an agreement had been reached with the Russian side on supplies of the Sputnik V vaccine.

On August 11, 2020, Russia became the first worldwide to register a vaccine against the coronavirus dubbed Sputnik V. The inoculation was developed by the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Healthcare Ministry.

Sputnik V is a human adenovirus-based vector vaccine. The Sputnik V jab has already been registered in Russia, Belarus, Argentina, Bolivia, Serbia, Algeria, Palestine, Venezuela, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, Hungary, the UAE, Iran, the Republic of Guinea, Tunisia and Armenia.

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.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 106,671,370 people have been infected worldwide and more than 2,326,720 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 78,361,490 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.