COVID-19 UPDATE: Russia and US vaccines generate immune response, studies find
Russia’s ‘Sputnik V’ vaccine showed promising results
Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine is found to be successfully generating antibodies that are similar to those who are naturally recovering from the novel coronavirus.
This is according to the report released Friday in the weekly peer-reviewed The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and best-known general medical journals.
The study is said to have “generated neutralizing antibodies in dozens of study subjects.” The vaccine also had mild side effects such as fever.
Developed by the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute, the vaccine is named Sputnik V. The name is reminiscent to the world’s first artificial satellite launched in 1957 by the Soviet Union.
All of the 76 study participants in the Phase 1 and 2 trials of Sputnik V developed antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
However, according to a CNN report, “only larger, Phase 3 trials can confirm” the effectiveness of the vaccine in keeping individuals from acquiring COVID-19.
“The data on the Russian vaccine studies reported in The Lancet are encouraging,” said Brendan Wren, professor of microbial pathogenesis, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in an interview with CNN.
Russia drew a sundry of reactions when it announced the world’s first approved coronavirus vaccine for public use in August, with some health experts calling it “rushed.”
US-developed immunization also found “safe,” according to journal
Novavax, an American vaccine development company, has also produced a vaccine that is “safe and elicits an immune response,” according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
These results had previously been announced by Novavax in early August, and has now been peer-reviewed in an official medical journal.
According to a separate CNN report, the study involved 131 healthy adults from two locations in Australia who all underwent the clinical trials in May. They were all under the age of 60
In a phase Phase 1 trial, doctors mostly watch to see if the vaccine is safe, but they also check to see if it produced a response.
After a month, some volunteers experienced mild fever for a day after the shot, and headache, fatigue and malaise for a median of two days or less.
Evenutally, it was found that the vaccine seemed to generate an immune response. All the volunteers who got the vaccine developed neutralizing antibodies after the second dose.
The vaccine also seemed to generate T-cells, the type of immune cells that also help protect the body from infection, in the 16 volunteers who were randomly selected and tested for T-cell response.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has given all public health officials in 50 states a heads up to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups “as soon as late October or early November.”
Around the world, there are 38 vaccines under various levels of trials, and five of them are in the US.