India on Friday started inoculating its population with Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, the jab’s developers said.
Sputnik in mid-April became the third vaccine to be approved by New Delhi along with the AstraZeneca shot – made in India – and the homegrown Covaxin of Bharat Biotech.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which helped finance the jab, said vaccination started in the southern city of Hyderabad on Friday, making Sputnik V the “first foreign-made vaccine that is used in India”.
A number of leading India-based drugmakers, including Virchow Biotech and Hetero Biopharma, have agreements for local production of Sputnik V with the aim to produce over 850 million doses of the jab a year.
In recent days India has been adding roughly as many new COVID-19 cases as the rest of the world put together.
More than 260,000 Indians have died, according to official figures. Experts believe the true death toll could be more than a million.
India began vaccinating its huge population of 1.3 billion people in early 2021 but it has faltered.
So far it has administered about 180 million jabs but only around 40 million people are fully vaccinated – around three percent of the population.
Sputnik which is named after the Soviet-era satellite, has been registered in 65 countries.
It has not yet been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Some Western countries have been wary of Sputnik V over concerns the Kremlin would use it as a soft-power tool to advance its interests.
Moscow registered the jab in August before large-scale clinical trials, but leading medical journal The Lancet has since said it is safe and more than 90 per cent effective.
