OREANDA-NEWS. Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ex-head of Rospotrebnadzor Gennady Onishchenko believes that the American Moderna, recognized as the best vaccine against COVID-19 at the World Vaccine Congress, is hardly applicable for humanitarian purposes of vaccination. In his opinion, the Russian "Sputnik V" could "convincingly compete" with competitors if such a competition were announced.

In an interview with a RIA Novosti correspondent, Onishchenko noted that the American vaccine "is more expensive than ours, and can hardly be applied for those humanitarian purposes for which vaccines must be used." On Thursday, Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Gamaleya Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Ministry of Health, said that the decision to recognize Moderna as the best among vaccines is economic and political, since recognizing Sputnik V would mean "giving money to the Russian Federation, and the Congress was in Washington."

Onishchenko said in this regard: "If the World Health Organization announced a competition for vaccines that could be purchased for a reasonable price for countries that have never had and will not have vaccine production in the near future, I think we would compete with them quite convincingly. "

Earlier, the developers of Sputnik V reported that mortality after vaccination with the Russian vaccine is much lower than that of foreign analogues. Thus, for Pfizer, the average mortality rate per 1 million doses is 39.4, for Moderna it is 20.2, and for Sputnik it is only 2. The study was conducted on the basis of official data from 13 health regulators as of April 19.