MOSCOW, May 19./TASS/: Russia knows for sure that the registration of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine is stalled by ‘signals from the corridors of power’ in Brussels, Sergey Naryshkin, director of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, told Channel One television on Wednesday. This is immoral amid the pandemic, he stressed.
"The European Medicines Agency (EMA) that registers all medicines is dragging its feet. I don’t want to accuse experts and EMA specialists, but we know for sure that this delay is connected with respective signals coming from EU’s corridors of power," the intelligence chief said.
"Why is this happening? Are there only political reasons behind it, or is an economic factor also present? I don’t know, let the nationals of European countries and law enforcement agencies sort this out, but we understand that this is simply immoral," Naryshkin said.
Russia was the first country in the world to register an anti-coronavirus vaccine in August 2020. The vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Health Ministry, was given the name Sputnik V. It is a vector vaccine based on the human adenovirus.
It has been registered by 61 countries with an overall population of over three billion people. The vaccine’s efficacy proved to be 97.6% based on the analysis of the coronavirus incidence data among Russians inoculated with both shots of the vaccine in a period from December 5, 2020, to March 31, 2021.
The European Medicines Agency said on March 4 it had begun the Sputnik V evaluation procedures to look at its compliance with the EU efficacy, safety and quality standards. The EMA anticipates that the registration of the Russian vaccine could be completed by late May.
