VERONA, October 29. /TASS/. The Chumakov Federal Scientific Center that developed the CoviVac vaccine is in perpetual contact with the World Health Organization (WHO) for CoviVac’s certification and hopes that the process won’t take long, the center’s Development Director Konstantin Chernov told TASS on the sidelines of the Eurasian Economic Forum.

"The process is moving ahead. This is, indeed, a process that we embarked on in the summer and continue to go forward on. We maintain continual communication with them. They request additional information and we provide it. We hope that as soon as we answer all their questions, everything will happen. We are regularly visited by the WHO’s delegation since even before all COVID events we were the only institution in the country that supplied large volumes of a vaccine to fight yellow fever to the global market. With yellow fever it took several years, with CoviVac, I think, it will be much faster. Yet I would be stretching the truth if I named any specific deadlines," he noted.

On February 19, the Russian Health Ministry certified the whole-virion inactivated CoviVac vaccine, developed by the Chumakov Federal Scientific Center for Research and Development of Immune and Biological Products of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Either artificially weakened viruses incapable of causing a disease or dead (inactivated) viruses are used in whole-virion vaccines.