Protect yourself

The developers tested the COVID-19 vaccine on themselves

Irina Nevinnaya, Rossiyskaya Gazeta

As part of the work on the creation of a coronavirus vaccine, the staff of the Gamalei Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation tested the vector vaccine they developed on themselves. The result is positive: immunity has been formed, but no negative effects have been detected. This was reported by Interfax with reference to the director of the center, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Ginzburg.

"As for the developers, yes, they are not so much experiencing themselves as they have protected themselves, so that in the conditions of a pandemic they can continue to develop. Everyone involved in the development, respectively, is all protected," Ginzburg said.

The academician did not specify the number of colleagues who injected themselves with the vaccine, however, according to him, it was a wide range of employees of the center – developers, organizers of preclinical research and technologists.

NICEM is one of many sites where scientists are currently actively working to create a vaccine that can protect against the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In particular, the WHO list includes at least nine promising Russian developments.

Alexander Ginzburg explained that NITSEM has developed a promising vaccine based on an adenovirus with the SARS-CoV-2 gene embedded in its DNA. In a simplified form, according to the scientist, the effect of the drug is as follows: the adenovirus is used as a "container" to deliver the coronavirus gene to the cells, to start the synthesis of proteins of the shell of the new coronavirus (the very "crown" thanks to which the coronavirus got its name). In this way, the immune system "gets acquainted" with a potential enemy. Vaccines of this type are called vector vaccines, Ginzburg said.

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