The Russian vaccine against covid-19 (Sputnik V) has been surprising the world since its birth. In August, the Russian state announced the vaccine before all the required clinical trials had been carried out and recently the vaccine’s effectiveness was finally known: 91.6%. This test of strength made the vaccine created with the support of the Kremlin very desired worldwide: from Argentina to Pakistan, through Tunisia and Algeria, there are already more than 50 countries that want Sputnik V. However, this high demand is starting to cause distribution problems.
Russia has a limited capacity to produce Sputnik V and so the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the state fund that controls the distribution of the vaccine, is looking to close deals with countries where the pharmaceutical industry is more developed, including those agreements clauses that allow Russia to receive millions of doses of its own vaccine – and thus protect its population.
This Wednesday, RDIF told the Financial Times (FT) which signed production contracts with 15 companies in ten different countries, for a total of 1.4 billion doses, enough to vaccinate 700 million people. Some of these countries – such as China, India or South Korea – will produce Sputnik V for export to other locations, while others – such as Brazil and Serbia – will only have to worry about their own domestic market. .
“We have some great players [que] they will produce for the whole world and we have smaller factories that they will produce to meet domestic demand. This is our approach. It solves the problem of large-scale production, while also offering local availability, ”said RDIF official, FT Cyrillic Dmitriev.
However, although this method solves the production problem, it also makes Sputnik V at the mercy of a “vast network” of “private subcontractors”, notes the FT, all of which operate under different regulators in different countries . And that leads to slowness: some of these companies have assured the Financial Times that it will take months before they can produce Sputnik V at full strength.
Only the factories in Brazil and India, for example, are responsible for producing more than half of the doses provided for by RDIF. Now, representatives of these factories told FT that the production of these doses has not yet started. União Química, a Brazilian company with an agreement with the Russian state, said that its production is still at an early stage and that it will only be able to reach the mark of eight million monthly doses in May. And GL Rapha, a South Korean manufacturer dedicated only to exports, admitted that it does not have the capacity to comply with the agreement it made with RDIF – 150 million doses in one year – and so it was forced to subcontract production to another company. , in addition to having already expanded its own facilities.
“700 million [de pessoas vacinadas] is a very high number and is unlikely [que seja atingido], given the current pace, ”commented Rasmus Bech Hansen, responsible for Airfinity, a platform for scientific and statistical analysis. “Each site can face different problems. When it comes to subcontracting, it takes some time before quality is guaranteed and production begins, ”he added. For this reason, Hansen lowers the expectations of the Russians: “We believe that a total production of 380 million doses in the whole of 2021 is a more realistic goal. But if production in India is not high, that number could be significantly lower, ”he warned.
According to data from Airfinity itself, so far only eight million doses of Sputnik V have been administered. To FT, Cyrillic Dmitriev refused to reveal the current production levels of the state vaccine, but assured that RDIF will announce next month the complete plan for Sputnik V’s production abroad.
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