BELGRADE, April 15./TASS/. In several months, Serbia will launch a full cycle of the production of Russia’s Sputnik V and China’s Sinopharm vaccines on its territory, President Aleksandar Vucic said on Thursday as he visited the Torlak Institute of Virology, Vaccines and Sera.

"We are now doing the prepackaging, but in a few months, we will be doing the entire production cycle for both the Russian and Chinese vaccines," President Vucic vowed. The full production of Sputnik V and Sinopharm will begin "in six to ten months," he promised.

On February 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic discussed the production of Sputnik V in Serbia. After the phone call, Vucic said that with the assistance of Russian specialists, Serbia would build the necessary facilities and would be producing the jab independently. Under the plans, in May, Serbia will begin prepackaging the Russian vaccine, while its full-scale production will be launched before the end of the year.

Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and Serbia’s Torlak Institute signed an agreement to localize manufacturing in Serbia on March 25.

Russia was the world’s first to register an anti-coronavirus vaccine on August 11, 2020. The jab, developed by the Russian Health Ministry’s Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, was dubbed Sputnik V. It is a vector vaccine based on the human adenovirus.

In early February 2020, The Lancet, a world-acclaimed medical journal, published the results of the third phase of Sputnik V’s clinical tests. The jab has proved to be among the world’s safest and most efficient. Thus, its efficacy is estimated at 91.6%. Ninety-eight percent of volunteers developed antibodies to the coronavirus.