The nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases has his doubts about Russia’s coronavirus vaccine claims.
Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that Russia’s rushed process to reach a vaccine likely did not result in a safe or effective remedy against the illness, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people since the pandemic began.
Fauci said during a Tuesday interview with National Geographic that he hopes Russia has “actually, definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they’ve done that.” He added that the United States has been putting its efforts toward “half a dozen or more vaccines.”
“So, if we wanted to take the chance of hurting a lot of people or giving them something that doesn’t work, we could start doing this, you know, next week if we wanted to. But that’s not the way it works,” said Fauci, who is part of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the “world’s first” coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday. He said that his own daughter had received the inoculation, although his announcement was met with doubt given the speed at which it was produced.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte generated headlines on Wednesday when he said he is ready to be “experimented on” and would take the vaccine himself. Duterte also said his country would participate in clinical trials for the experimental drug.
Worldwide, there have been some 20.4 million cases of COVID-19 and at least 745,000 deaths.
