Pakistan approves Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine for emergency use

According to details, government has given a go-ahead to a local pharmaceutical company for the import and distribution of the Russian-developed vaccine ‘Gam-COVID-Vac’.

Russia’s Sputnik V has become the third to be approved for emergency use as country experiences second wave of coronavirus.

Authorities are hopeful that first batch of Sputnik V would arrive in Pakistan by the end of January.

Last week, the drug regulatory authority approved Oxford–AstraZeneca and China's Sinopharm vaccines for widespread use; however, the country has not received batches of any vaccine as yet.

Sputnik V is the world’s first registered vaccine based on a well-studied human adenoviral vector-based platform, the vaccine’s site states adding that it currently ranks among top-10 candidate vaccines approaching the end of clinical trials and the start of mass production on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list.

The ongoing Sputnik V post-registration clinical trial in Russia involved 40,000 volunteers.

“Requests for more than 1.2 billion doses of the Sputnik V vaccine came from more than 50 countries. The vaccine supplies for the global market will be produced by RDIF’s international partners in India, Brazil, China, South Korea and other countries,” Sputnik V website states.

So far, world has reported 99,363,402 coronavirus cases with 2,131,261 deaths.