 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch and NewsClick. Today we are joined by immunologist Dr. Satyajit Ratan. We are going to be talking about Russia's announcement on August 12th that they had registered the first COVID-19 vaccine. Now this vaccine is being called Sputnik 5 and it's still not gone into phase 3 trials but they're already talking about mass production, they've already been ordered to apparently. Thank you so much Dr. Ratan for joining us. So first of all could you take us through what exactly has been the development process around this and also the announcement itself because there is of course a geopolitical issue but keeping strictly sticking to the medical aspect and the scientific aspect of it. How do you pass this announcement? So what the you know we keep saying what the Russians have been doing but more properly what the Gamalaya Institute in Moscow has been doing is pretty much what a couple of dozen other laboratories and groups across the world have been doing. There's certainly a Chinese vaccine candidate, there's certainly the Oxford vaccine candidate. All of these are one of say five or six different vaccine technologies and this particular set of technologies as far as I can tell and we'll come back to why I'm being cautious about this but as far as I can tell this particular technology is akin to one of the Chinese technologies I think Sinovac or one of them, you know Sinovac and to the Oxford vaccine technology in the sense that it uses an a basic virus into which the SARS-CoV-2 target has been inserted. So you take a different virus, a virus that doesn't cause disease but into that virus you insert the information for the SARS-CoV-2 target that you want to immunize with and then you basically you infect people with this virus. Now since the virus doesn't cause illness, infect people doesn't really shouldn't really cause harm and both the Chinese and the Oxford vaccine and I think one of the vaccine candidate have all shown that while there are some you know redness and fever kind of effects there is no serious adverse effect to this category of vaccine delivery system. So the Gamalai Institute has made apparently therefore let me use the technical word an adenoviral vector based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate. They also seem to have like everybody else has registered after animal experiments human trials, phase one clinical trials that should show safety in a small number of people, phase two clinical trials that should establish whether the vaccine generates an immune response primarily an antibody response in humans in a slightly larger number of not many people. As far as anybody can tell these two trials at least as far as documentation can be passed have not yet been completed leave alone their data being analyzed and released more properly published in peer reviewed fashion but even released none of that seems to have happened. Instead and this is where the major departure comes we have the press conference and the show that was put on yesterday or yesterday. So now this is an enormous departure many of us have been thinking and saying ever since the pandemic started that it's possible that sheer anxiety desperation and nativist nationalist competitiveness coupled to the consequences of neoliberal capitalism as behaving as though the world is a competitive marketplace all of these together are going to put enormous pressure on regulatory on drug and vaccine regulatory authorities which are nation specific to take shortcuts for vaccine approval. This one seems to be the first such example I'm saying seems to be because all we have as far as I can tell all that we have heard so far is an announcement by the president of Russia and we haven't really seen any other documentation of any sort whatsoever but what that implies is the following what that implies and this is a sort of best case guess is that they have reasonable results from the phase one and phase two trials. Remember these haven't been analyzed published and looked at but they have reasonable results this is not unlikely because similar technologies elsewhere have reasonable results the trouble with this is that when you give a vaccine like this the question of whether you have immune responses can be split into multiple levels one is you have immune responses but are those immune responses protected that's a whole different question altogether now you can take the blood samples from these vaccinated individuals and you can test whether those antibodies can neutralize SARS-CoV-2 virus and I'm assuming that the Gamalaya Institute has evidence to say that the answer is yes again the other vaccine trials I've shown this so it wouldn't be surprising if this shows my guess best guess at this point is that at this point the russian state has stepped in and said we have neutralizing antibodies that's generated by a vaccine candidate enough is it's safe enough is enough let's just declare it approved as a vaccine this is an enormously risky step so the question becomes why have the russians taken this step and as I said the background pressures both of anxiety and desperation about the pandemic on the one hand we have no idea to what extent the russian official numbers both of cases and of deaths are correct coupled to nativist nationalist upsurges everywhere which have led to a perfect storm by converging with the new liberal capitalist marketplace into a competitive vaccine nationalism in which one-upmanship of this sort presumably becomes an attractive end goal and I can imagine that all of these have led to this which is a very sorry state of affairs right so dr for our viewers could you just explain that in this context what is the special significance of the third round of trials which is conducted on a much larger level right so as I said the phase two trial says is there an antibody response generated by this vaccine candidate and let's assume the answer is yes you can now ask is that antibody that is generated capable of protecting against the disease and one step one small step is that you can test whether it neutralizes the virus but neutralizing the virus is actually quite different in the laboratory in a petri dish literally in a petri dish from whether in the community vaccinated people are protected against disease and the phase three clinical trial which typically involves thousands if not tens of thousands of volunteers and at least months if not years of follow up what it does is test whether the incidence of disease is substantially different between vaccinated and unvaccinated people and it's only when those results come out that we know whether the vaccine works at least a little bit to protect against the disease because also in that we want protection against disease it's disease protection that's at the heart of the decision about whether to take a vaccine into the community or not so that hasn't been done right and also in this context we talk about some of the other candidates and what's happening with them what are the options that look promising right now so as I said and now I may be getting numbers wrong because numbers change pretty much every day every week these days and somewhere around a dozen vaccine candidates across the world have entered human trials at least half of those have by now completed phase one and phase two trials some of them are still analyzing the data some have finished their data analysis three or four of them have published their phase one and phase two trial results and have entered phase three clinical trials which all of it is how it should be now they are all being very optimistic hopeful that phase three trial results will be statistically robust enough in a few months to justify declaring that the trial is over and that the vaccine shows protection and if that happens then by the end of this calendar year we will have more than one vaccine candidate that has completed vaccine trials phase three vaccine trials and therefore can now be approved and declared to be vaccines rather than vaccine candidates that's the point at which the enormous global political economy push and pull will begin about how to make vaccines accessible affordably to everybody in timely fashion and that's a whole different kind of forms altogether thank you so much doctor for talking to us thank you that's all we have time for today keep watching news click and people's dispatch