Foreign Affairs Secretary Teosoro Locsin Jr. is picking the Russian-made Sputnik V as his choice of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) vaccine.
Locsin made this comment on Thursday after The Lancet, the prestigious peer-review journal, published an interim analysis of phase 3 of the clinical trials of Sputnik V which registered a 91 percent overall efficacy and 100 percent for severe cases.
“I’m turning every stone to get Sputnik V in. It is the one I will trust my life to. The Lancet review is definitive,” the foreign affairs chief said.
According to the report, a total of 19,866 volunteers were included in the efficacy analysis, 14,964 of whom received the vaccine and 4,902 the placebo. Sputnik V is one of the three vaccines with an efficacy of over 90 percent, the other being the Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna.
Locsin further praised the Russians for delivering on its decades-old promise to develop vaccines and for its excellence in research.
“Expectedly. The Soviet Union delivered on one promise fully: the development of vaccines against contagious diseases from 1917 to the Soviet dissolution and on to the present as the Russian Federation. Anything Russians do in the field has close to a century of superb research,” he said in a separate tweet.
Sputnik V is being developed by Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology.