Iran will receive its first vaccines from Russia, and other news from around the world.
A shipment of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine will arrive in Iran this week.
A shipment of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine will arrive in Iran this week.Credit…Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock
Iran announced on Tuesday that its first batch of Covid-19 vaccine, Russia’s Sputnik V, would arrive on Thursday. It coincided with a study published on Tuesday in The Lancet, a British medical journal, that the vaccine was safe and effective.
The news could not come at a better time for Iran. Vaccines, like everything else in the Islamic Republic, have been politicized and subject to disinformation from the top down.
Iran’s supreme leader has declared a ban on importing American- and British-made vaccines, saying they could not be trusted. The Iranian Health Ministry canceled a batch of donated Pfizer doses and said it would import vaccines from Russia and China and develop a vaccine with Cuba.
For weeks, senior Iranian health officials have publicly argued over whether it was safe to inoculate Iranians with the Russian vaccine because it had not been approved by the World Health Organization or any Western medical agency.
Before the Lancet study said that Sputnik V had a 91.6 percent efficacy rate against the coronavirus, several high-profile Iranians had expressed skepticism about it, including Iran’s top infectious disease official and the head of Parliament’s health committee. And 98 physicians from Iran’s largest union of medical workers wrote a letter last week to President Hassan Rouhani urging him not to purchase the “unapproved and unsafe” Sputnik vaccine.
Other health officials pushed back, defending the Russian vaccine, including the health minister and his former spokesman.
On Twitter, a hashtag trending in Persian was #buysafevaccines, as many Iranians declared that they would reject Russian- and Chinese-made vaccines.
In other news from around the world:
New Zealand’s drug regulator said on Wednesday that it had provisionally approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine but added 58 conditions, most of which require the manufacturer to supply extra data. Pfizer said last week that the first of the 1.5 million vaccines on order were expected to arrive before the end of February. New Zealand’s director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, has said that the country will be “ready to start vaccinating people as soon as a vaccine arrives.”
The state of Victoria, Australia, which includes the city of Melbourne, declared the coronavirus “technically eliminated” on Wednesday — for the second time — after a month in which no new cases were recorded. The state government also announced a rollout plan for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that is scheduled to begin in late February. Frontline health workers will be among those included in the first phase, and nine vaccination hubs will be established at the state’s major hospitals. “This is a significant day in the response of the Victorian community to the pandemic,” said Martin Foley, the state’s health minister. “It turns a corner.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said on Tuesday that his government had signed a tentative deal with Novavax to produce the company’s coronavirus vaccine at a government facility in Montreal, once the drug and the site are approved by domestic regulators. Canada has a separate agreement to purchase 52 million doses of the Maryland-based company’s drug, but its regulators have so far only approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Novavax is expected to deliver results from its Phase 3 clinical trials in the United States in March, and to deliver 100 million doses for use there later this year.
— Farnaz Fassihi The New York Times