Washington (AFP)
Immunologist Anthony Fauci, voice of scientific reason in the United States on the Covid-19 pandemic, expressed doubts on Friday about the safety of vaccines currently being developed by Russia and China.
"I really hope that the Chinese and the Russians test their vaccines before giving them to anyone," he said during a hearing before the US Congress.
"Claiming to have a vaccine ready for distribution even before testing it is, in my opinion, problematic, to put it mildly," added the highly respected director of the American Institute of Infectious Diseases, which believes that states -United will not have to depend on vaccines from other countries.
Russia announced this week that it hopes to start industrial production as early as September and October of two vaccines against Covid-19 designed by researchers from state centers.
Kirill Dmitriev, chairman of a Russian sovereign wealth fund funding the development of one of the two, compared the current race for the Covid vaccine to the conquest of space.
"The Americans were amazed when they heard the signal from Sputnik", the first artificial satellite launched by the USSR in 1957, he told American news channel CNN. "With the vaccine, it will be the same. We will be the first."
Moscow has not shared scientific data supporting the safety and effectiveness of its vaccines.
Several vaccine projects have shown encouraging results, including a Chinese one designed jointly by a military research institute and the pharmaceutical group CanSino Biologics.
The Chinese army authorized its use in its ranks at the end of June, even though the last phases of testing had not started.
Three vaccines developed in Western countries are in the last phase of their clinical trial, on humans: one from the American company Moderna, one developed by the British University of Oxford in partnership with the AstraZeneca laboratory and one from the German-American BioNTech / Pfizer Alliance.
© 2020 AFP