MOSCOW, December 2. /TASS/: Russian citizens will be provided with vaccines against the coronavirus on a priority basis, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday.
"Naturally, Russians are an absolute priority," Peskov said. According to him, domestic production in Russia, which is being developed now, will meet Russians’ demands in the first place.
"As for demands of potential consumers of this vaccine from overseas, they will be mainly provided via those production chains, which the Russian Direct Investment Fund is currently cultivating with foreign partners," Peskov noted.
An absolute priority will be "Russians who wish to get vaccinated," he stressed.
The Kremlin spokesman declined to answer a question whether Russia needed any foreign vaccines against the coronavirus. "This is a matter of the government’s crisis center, I cannot reply," he explained.
Russia registered the world’s first vaccine against the novel coronavirus on August 11. The vaccine, dubbed Sputnik V, was developed by the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Health Ministry, and its clinical trials were successfully completed in June-July. The vaccine is based on a platform that had been used for a number of other vaccines. Head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev stated earlier that Russia had already received requests from 20 countries to supply 1 bln doses of the vaccine.
