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Catalonia calls on EU to speed up process of registration of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine

A vaccination campaign against the novel coronavirus kicked off in Spain on December 27, 2020

MADRID, February 12. /TASS/. The government of Catalonia, an autonomous community in Spain, calls on the European Union authorities to speed up the process of registration of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, sources in the regional government told TASS on Friday.

According to the sources, Catalonia’s government "calls on the European authorities to speed up the process of the evaluation of the Sputnik vaccine."

A vaccination campaign against the novel coronavirus kicked off in Spain on December 27, 2020. Currently, three vaccines are being used in that country, namely Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s vaccine, Moderna’s vaccine, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

Since the coronavirus outbreak in Spain, more than three million cases and some 64,000 fatalities have been reported.

On August 11, 2020, Russia registered the world’s first vaccine against the novel coronavirus. The vaccine, dubbed Sputnik V, was developed by the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Health Ministry. It is a vector vaccine based on the human adenovirus. Mass production of the vaccine was launched on August 15, 2020.

On February 2, 2020, The Lancet, a world-acclaimed medical journal, published the results of the third phase of Sputnik V clinical tests. The vaccine 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. All developed cell-mediated immunity. Immunity after vaccination proved to be by 1.3-1.5% higher than after the disease.