MADRID, March 24. /TASS/. Spain can emerge as one of the large centers of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine production in Europe, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev said in an interview with Spain’s Antena 3 TV Wednesday.
"We have agreements with 10 countries, and we believe that Spain will soon join the ranks of states that we work with," he noted. "We have reached an agreement on key parameters [with a potential Spanish producer], but it is one of the countries which want to wait until the position of the [European] Medicines Agency (EMA) on the vaccine [is revealed]."
"Nevertheless, we saw that neither Italy nor Spain requires the EMA approval to produce the vaccine, it can be done with permission of the local [regulator] and it can be something that we can do in the meantime," Dmitriev noted. "We will make an announcement when it is all over and we believe that Spain will become one of our large production centers in Europe."
"I want to confirm that there are pharmaceutical companies in Spain that can produce our vaccine and are now producing other vaccines," the RDIF CEO pointed out. "After June, we will be able to produce 15 million doses [of the vaccine for Europe], and we will, of course, be able to make more later."
On August 11, 2020, Russia became the first country in the world to register a coronavirus vaccine, the jab was named Sputnik V and was developed by the Gamaleya Center. Sputnik V is based on a human adenoviral vector-based platform. The jab has now been authorized in more than 50 countries around the world with a total population of over 1.3 billion people. The jab’s efficacy stands at 91.6%, which was confirmed in a review published in The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Sputnik V is ranked in the top three vaccines in the number of state authorizations obtained around the world.
On March 4, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) reported that the rolling review of the Russian jab had begun.