MOSCOW, May 6. /TASS/. The decision by the World Vaccine Congress Washington 2021 to recognize Moderna - an American pharmaceutical and biotech corporation - as having the world’s best coronavirus vaccine is strange and disputable, Director of the Moscow-based Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, the Sputnik V developer, Alexander Gintsburg told TASS.

"I can say that it’s absolutely unclear how all this was evaluated, given the high mortality rate from mRNA vaccines and the AstraZeneca [drug], which is by the way also high, but much less than the mRNA vaccines. <…> This is such a strange choice, at any rate, for me it’s unclear on what grounds and on what particular unbiased criteria this was based," Gintsburg emphasized.

At the forum, an annual event held in Washington even before the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, the Moderna jab was picked as the best COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine developed by US company Pfizer jointly with its German partner BioNTech, also got rather high marks. The short list of nominees also included Sputnik V developed by Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology and the drug produced by AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish company, jointly with the University of Oxford.