HANOI, July 21. /TASS/. The Vietnamese pharmaceutical company Vabiotech confirmed on Wednesday the production of the first test batch of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine at its facilities. Prior to that, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced the start of production of the Sputnik V vaccine in Vietnam on Tuesday.
As noted by the representative of Vabiotech, the packaging of the trial batch of the vaccine, consisting of 30,000 doses, began about three weeks ago.
"We have just sent part of the produced vaccine to Russia for quality control," he said.
Earlier, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry announced that the Health Ministry and the RDIF would sign a contract for the packaging of up to 5 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine per month in Vietnam. According to the ministry, they also considered an option to transfer the technology for the production of the Russian vaccine in the amount of up to 100 mln doses per year to the Vietnamese side.
Sputnik V received registration from the Vietnamese Health Ministry on March 23 this year.
To date, Sputnik V has been registered in 68 countries with a total population of over 3.7 billion people, which is nearly half of the global population. The data obtained by regulators of a number of countries during the vaccination of the population, including Argentina, Serbia, Bahrain, Hungary, Mexico, UAE, Philippines and others, demonstrates that Sputnik V is one of the safest and most effective vaccines against coronavirus.