RIO DE JANEIRO, May 13. /TASS/. The future government of Ecuador intends to conclude an agreement on the purchase of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, President-elect Guillermo Lasso announced on Wednesday.

According to him, Ecuador will conclude an agreement with Russia on the provision of the Sputnik V vaccine to strengthen the country’s vaccination plans. He also noted the importance of the relevant agreements for the health of the country’s people and the return of the country to normal life.

At the end of April, Lasso announced that he had sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which he asked for help with the acquisition of the coronavirus vaccines.

The COVID-19 vaccination campaign kicked off in Ecuador on January 21. Drugs from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Sinovac Biotech are used for vaccination. To date, 265,000 people have been vaccinated with both doses, and a little more than 1 mln have received the first dose.

According to the latest data, the number of coronavirus cases in the country has reached 402,595, the number of deaths - 14,054. The first coronavirus case in the country was registered on February 29, 2020.

Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine has already been registered by regulators in about 60 countries, with a total population of more than 1.5 bln people. More than 30 countries have begun mass vaccination with Sputnik V. The vaccine’s effectiveness at the level of 91.6% is confirmed by the publication of data in the leading medical journal The Lancet. On March 4, the European Medicines Agency announced the start of the procedure for the sequential examination of the Sputnik V vaccine. According to the forecasts of the regulator’s representative, registration can be completed by the end of May.

In late December 2019, Chinese officials informed 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.