"It will be possible to fully return to a normal and peaceful life only after the discovery of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus vaccine", the Head of the Ministry of Health, Murashko, stated. The quite reasonable statement from the official does not match the unreasonable and even criminal actions of the management of Rospotrebnadzor in relation to the fight against the spread of the infection and the creation of a vaccine.
While doctors are working hard by saving people and fulfilling their duty, government officials have violated everything that can be violated, and by trying to make money from the pandemic, they block the scientific work of virologists who are not part of the agency.
Coronavirus has become a good reason to earn money from research, and the one who creates a vaccine can count on fame and high reputation not only in the scientific community. ANY door and all budgets will be opened for him.
Usually, the development of a vaccine takes 8-10 years. This takes so long because it is essential to understand the disease, the specifics of its life cycle, mutations of its pathogen, and, most importantly, to ensure the safety of the vaccine itself for humans.
Stage I. The study of the biology of the pathogen. Virologists study the genome, proteins and enzymes of the virus, they study its shape, structure and size, and the nature of reproduction. They investigate how it causes the disease, and what immune response is optimal against the disease.
Stage II. Choosing a strategy to fight the virus. The strategy determines which vaccines should be created - inactivated (based on dead cells of the virus), live-attenuated (based on weakened virus cells), virosomal (there are only virus proteins) or subunit ( that activates the body's immune response). This stage usually lasts the longest – from 2 to 4 years.
Stage III. Testing the vaccines on animals. Evaluating the efficacy of the substances and finding ways to improve the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Stage IV. Clinical trials on humans and receiving an official endorsement from WHO. A vaccine that works on animals is not always effective in humans. Clinical trials start with small groups and must be completed on collectivities with a size of 1,000 or more actual patients, and every parameter of the vaccine, its safety and effectiveness, is again tested.
So it's not surprising that research took so long before. But the threat to the whole world has led to the fact that for the first time in the history of medicine, WHO predicts the creation of a vaccine within 1.5-3 years. Even in this "short" period, the lack of a vaccine will cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Russia. But government officials are not concerned about this, they are driven by greed and the desire to snatch "their own piece", to receive rewards, but professionals who are not associated with the agency interfere with this. That’s why, government officials are not fighting the virus, they are fighting virologists instead.
Rospotrebnadzor should monitor compliance with sanitary provisions and be responsible for biological safety in the country. The current situation has shown that the department's management is not able to work with epidemics of diseases that occur asymptomatically in 80% of cases. The outbreaks of measles and hemorrhagic fever that occur in certain regions have taught them nothing. The support staff describe their work in the first weeks of the spread of coronavirus as a "typical Russian mess", then, the workers were uncontrolled by their own judgement. "The border was far from closed", some took the temperatures of those who arrived from other countries, some took swabs selectively, and others took swabs from everyone. There was no task of conducting the coronavirus test on asymptomatic patients. Consequently, scientists who study the genetic features of COVID-19 in Russians claim that the virus was "imported" from several countries in Europe and China. Yes, it was exactly on the flights from China that no infected people were detected, since swabs were initially not taken at all. So, it is not surprising that in the end, Russia became the second country in the world in terms of the number of infected people due to the unskilled work of the Rospotrebnadzor management.
You'd think that they need to work better and keep a "low profile", so that the media do not tell the population about the contribution of Rospotrebnadzor to the spread of the virus. Yes it was not the only one that worked abominably, similar agencies in the United States and Europe were not better prepared, but government officials are confident in their own impunity and when a lot of money- 1.5 billion rubles allocated by the state for the creation of diagnostic test systems and the search for a vaccine- is at stake, they can not allow more competent competitors to take the money away "from under their noses".
In Russia, more than 20 test systems were registered to detect the new coronavirus. Foreign ones were among them, including those that were given free of charge by WHO. But the heads of the agency "pushed the competitors aside" and transferred all the authority to the Novosibirsk Centre of Virology "Vector", which was not ready for intensive and high-quality work in the pandemic situation:
Problems with the sample analysis. Tests of the first test system gave a false negative result in 20-30% of cases;
It takes 4 hours to do the PCR test. The results of tests from Novosibirsk went to infectious diseases hospitals from 7 to 28 days. Several thousand people died while waiting for their results.
Meanwhile, while Vector was slowly "swinging" to full-fledged work in the pandemic situation, the results of other virology institutes were blocked. Then the production of test systems was transferred to a "completely random" private company "Evotech-Mirai Genomics", affiliated with the billionaire Arkady Rotenberg and Putin's daughter, Katerina Tikhonova. The corrupt people did not even invest their money in creating the business. Equipment and other expenses in the amount of more than 1 billion rubles "passed" through the Direct Investment Fund. The company won the tender for the purchase of test systems even before its creation. That’s why, when choosing a manufacturer, officials were not stopped by: the high cost of tests, which is almost 2 times higher than the average one for the market; or the need to buy more mobile laboratories instead of taking tests based on the existing capabilities of diagnosticians.
Of course, the issue of production of test systems does not concern Rospotrebnadzor, it shows "what’s behind" the corrupt officials who profit from coronavirus.
Now Rospotrebnadzor is busy blocking the possibility of creating a vaccine by institutions that are not part of its structure. Its position as the main agency for biological safety complicates the work of scientists from the Ministry of Health, the FMBA (Federal Medical-Biological Agency of Russia) and the RAS (Russian Academy of Sciences).
The first thing that Rospotrebnadzor did was to get an exclusive right to study COVID-19. The other institutes did not receive a strain from China. Rospotrebnadzor protected the monopoly of the Vector Research Centre on samples, including blocking the supply of strains from Europe for the rest. Then, the heads of the territorial bodies of Rospotrebnadzor were required to collect and transport biological material, from the regions, to only one place — the Vector Research Centre, to study the infection.
All this was significant, but absolutely meaningless - virologists from other laboratories did not have a problem taking swabs from infected people in local hospitals.
Subsequently, Rospotrebnadzor tried to block the work on sequencing (decoding biopolymer proteins and nucleic acids- DNA and RNA), they did not coordinate it with the centers of gene technologies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Again, a puncture - on March 19, 2020, virologists at the Smorodintsev Research Institute of Influenza in St. Petersburg deciphered the genetic structure of the Russian variety of COVID-19. Initially, the results were ignored. A couple of weeks later, when it became clear that Vector could not provide anything, the research institute felt pressure – the licensing process for working with biologically dangerous agents was tightened and they tried to block the publication of the created strain.
The actions of Rospotrebnadzor limit Russia's contribution to the study of the genetics of the new virus. In the EpiCoV GISAID global database, there are now about 150 sequences (sequentially decoded chains of the virus) from Russia. For comparison, the UK has already given about 4 thousand. In other words, we lose priority in researching the virus. Rospotrebnadzor does not issue permits to work on pathogenic structures of the virus and thus puts scientists in an illegal position. They can only work on the vaccine as "enthusiasts" and will not be able to publish their results openly.
In that way, the structures of Rospotrebnadzor- Vector Research Centre and "Microbe" institute- received 1.5 billion rubles, but all the real work is done by others, Russia could become the birthplace of the coronavirus vaccine, but Rospotrebnadzor does everything so that Russian scientists could not confirm their priority.
Betrayal of the country's interests, negligence, and inability to organize effective work to create a vaccine in the "best" way describe the agency's leadership. We do not believe that the perpetrators of lawlessness will be punished, but we want the impudent officials to get out of the way and not disturb Russian scientists trying to save our lives!
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https://new-science.ru/skolko-vremeni-nuzhno-chtoby-razrabotat-novuju-vakcinu/
https://meduza.io/feature/2020/03/05/poslednie-dannye-po-koronavirusu-vo-vsem-mire-tablitsa