"We also discussed the issue of how things are going with the purchase of the Sputnik V vaccine. There is no pan-European order here, which means that Germany is doing this independently. For us, the decisive question is whether we will use it is when the European Medicines Agency registers it. So far, not all the documents are available, The Paul Ehrlich Institute is a speaker, so we are well informed, but there are not enough documents for registration", Merkel said after a meeting with the heads of regions on the issue of vaccination.
According to her, if the registration will be "very soon", "then, of course, it makes sense to buy Sputnik."
"If it will be in a few months, then in general we will have enough vaccines, so the question how much [Sputnik V] we can order will depend on this", the chancellor added.
In February, the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet published an interim analysis from Phase III trials of the Russian vaccine, showing its 91.6-percent efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19. The vaccine has already been approved in 60 countries, with a total population of about 3 billion.
