Sputnik V: Russia's pace of development for coronavirus vaccine is worrying

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Issues attached to Russian vaccine (Image: scmp.com)
Issues attached to Russian vaccine (Image: scmp.com)

Moscow : Russia has already approved a vaccine for coronavirus and there are reports which claim that the first batch of vaccine has already been produced and is ready for a dispatch.

Even though the world is waiting for a vaccine to combat the coronavirus, the sudden announcement has given birth to several doubts and speculations over the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Here are some points which are a cause of worry behind development of Sputnik V:

# Time of development: Russia has announced the development of coronavirus vaccine with approval in a very short duration of time which has raised speculations that the country may have skipped some crucial steps which must be taken before releasing the medicine to public.

# Extra Pressure on Other Nation: With the announcement of a coronavirus vaccine from Russia, the other countries which have been trying to develop a similar vaccine will get extra pressure to pace-up the process during which probability of skipping some testing steps has also increased.

# Risk attached to failure of medicine in public domain: We sincerely hope that Russia's vaccine performs well and give people relief from coronavirus, but thinking about the different aspect, if medicine fails after coming in public domain, the people will lose trust on the vaccine and the future products.

# Disaster comes with over speed: Any move to roll out the vaccine based on limited evidence that it works could have harmful consequences, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. 

"That could cause other leaders to say: ‘Look, they’re doing it, and that’s good enough. And if that’s good enough for them, we don’t want to lose out. We want to protect our populations too,’" he said.

# Politics over people health: Russia has signed deals with several nations including India for mass productions so as soon as the medicine is launched it can go ahead for production and help in revive economy. So are we looking at the politics over people's health?