MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. The Chumakov Center will carry out research to find out how effective the CoviVac vaccine is against the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus, the center’s director, associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Aidar Ishmukhametov told TASS on Tuesday.
"We plan to conduct research to find out how effective the CoviVac vaccine is effective against the Omicron variant. I would like to point out that our vaccine has turned out to be effective against all known mutations of the coronavirus and hopefully Omicron will not be an exception," he said.
Ishmukhametov recalled that the World Health Organization might register CoviVac in the middle of 2022.
Russia’s Health Ministry on February 19 registered an inactivated whole-virion vaccine CoviVac, developed at the Chumakov Center. Such vaccines are based on either artificially weakened viruses unable to cause an infection, or dead (inactivated) ones.
The Chumakov Federal Scientific Center for Research into and Development of Immune and Biological Products under the Russian Academy of Sciences was created on the basis of the Institute of Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, which combined research laboratories with vaccine manufacturing facilities. The Center was created by Dr. Mikhail Chumakov, who remained its director up to 1972.
The center is one of the world’s leading medical establishments conducting research into medical virology, including poliomyelitis and other infections. The center has its own biotechnological manufacturing facility capable of producing vaccines on the commercial basis.