Russian Vaccines Effective Against COVID Mutations 'Scaring Everyone in Europe', Putin Says

The mutated variants of the virus resulted in the tightening of pandemic restrictions in Europe, with the highly-virulent British strain forcing the UK to go into national lockdown, while many nations suspended travel to and from Britain, to curb the pandemic.

President Vladimir Putin stressed that Russian vaccines are effective against coronavirus mutations during a meeting with the head of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency, Veronika Skvortsova.

"As I was told, the vaccines we have are effective against these strains scaring everyone in Europe and many other places today. The trials of these vaccines, which face the virus, show that our medications are effective against these strains", Putin stated.

Skvortsova confirmed there are some cases of mutations of the infection in Russia, noting that at least 3,500 mutations were identified, but only 7 of them were detected in different people, covering over 5 percent of the Russia population.

Russian vaccine "Sputnik V" in the city hospital "Leninskaya CRH" in the city of Leninsk.

© Sputnik / Kirill Braga

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"And in this regard, the receptor domain in our population is unchanged, and all our vaccines, 'Sputnik' and the vaccine produced by 'Vector', work well", she said.

The Russian authorities earlier said that the country has already opened 4,000 vaccination stations and produced at least 10 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine and 80,000 doses of EpiVacCorona.

In total, Russia plans to produce over 88 million doses of anti-coronavirus medications during the first six months of 2021, including 83 million doses of Sputnik V and 5.4 million doses of EpiVacCorona, apart from the third vaccine, the recently-registered CoviVac, developed by the Chumakov Federal Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences.