Exclusive: How Russia's Sputnik-V vaccine was developed within months

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Not too far away from Moscow's Red Square is the Gamaleya Institute, a research institution that gained world fame after it registered Sputnik-V.

CGTN had the unique and exclusive opportunity to visit the Gamaleya Institute and speak with its head, Aleksandar Ginzburg. CGTN asked him how his institution developed the Sputnik-V vaccine in only a few months and how he responded to the initial wave of skepticism by some about the institution's work.

"We were well-prepared in advance for this work. Over the past 20 and more years, our institute has been developing a platform that allows the replacement of defective genes with well-functioning ones. This technology was well-developed, but it was not adopted for practice due to economic and other circumstances. In 2014 we faced the task of creating a vaccine against the Ebola virus. The structure of that virus is very similar to COVID-19," Ginzburg said.

That Russians are working extensively on the vaccine against Ebola is not a secret, but their progress in that area went pretty much unnoticed.

"We realized that we had powerful technology in our hands, which would allow us to make necessary preparations fast. And indeed, within 15 months, we made a vaccine against Ebola, which demonstrated very good results in all three phases of clinical trials and on the field in Guinea in Africa. That's why the drug was registered," he said.

"Using this technology, we created a vaccine against another coronavirus, MERS, which had a lethality of 38 percent. With those developments, we learned more about the quantity and timing of vaccine doses. All of that allowed us to have a head start and develop a vaccine against COVID-19 within five months, which you now know under the name Sputnik-V," he explained.

However, the swift development of the Sputnik-V vaccine attracted some skepticism, particularly in the West.

"I haven't seen skepticism among scientists from the U.S., China, and Western Europe. It's mainly been the economic community that has expressed skepticism – the companies not engaged in the development of these vaccines but on the commercial side. As we all now know, the market for these vaccines is the largest in pharmaceutical history," Ginzburg said.

According to the latest announcements, India and South Korea have already produced the Sputnik-V vaccine in their countries, and production should soon start in China. Serbia and Italy would be the first countries in Europe to start their localized production of the vaccine.