Scores of members of Russia’s business and political elite have been getting early access to an experimental vaccine against COVID-19. Citing “people familiar with the effort,” Bloomberg News says top executives and billionaire tycoons and government officials began getting shots developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute in Moscow as early as April. Researchers on the Gamaleya vaccine project were reported last week to have completed a Phase 1 trial involving Russian military personnel. The institute hasn’t published results of the study, which is said to have involved about 40 people, but has begun the next stage of trials with a larger group. Russia has reported more than 750,000 cases of COVID-19, the fourth-largest total in the world. Russia has said the vaccine could be distributed nationally as early as September. The shot is said to be a viral vector vaccine based on a human common-cold virus fused with the spike protein of SARS CoV-2 to stimulate an immune response. Bloomberg says it has confirmed that dozens of people have had the shots, but that none would allow their names to be published.
