The Russian developers of the Sputnik V vaccine and the booster, Sputnik Light, have claimed their vaccine, which is yet to win regulatory approval in SA, is stronger than others in fighting the Omicron variant that’s driving a surge of infections globally.
The SA Health Products Regulating Authority (Sahpra) has raised concerns about the use of Sputnik V in SA due to the country’s high prevalence of HIV and has asked the applicant to provide more data. The application was lodged in February.
The Russians said the virus-neutralising antibodies against Omicron produced by Sputnik V and Sputnik Light were higher than those of other vaccines. Sputnik Light was said to produce neutralising antibodies against Omicron in 100% of individuals two to three months after being revaccinated.
The results were released during a virtual media conference from Moscow by the investor in the vaccines, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and the vaccines developer, the Gamaleya Centre.
RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev said studies by Gemaleya Centre deputy director of science Prof Denis Logunov — a key developer of the Sputnik V vaccine — showed it produced the best results in the world in neutralising Omicron.
Gemaleya Centre director Alexander Gintsburg said the Omicron samples were taken from Russians returning from abroad. He advocated the use of Sputnik Light as a booster in combination with different vaccines used around the world to strengthen the antibody response to Covid-19.
Dmitriev added that Sputnik Light used as a stand-alone vaccine had shown 78.6% efficacy in the 60- to 79-year-old age group in Argentina.
But the Russian study was contradicted by a Bloomberg report that said results of a study showed that the vaccines produced by China’s state-owned Sinopharm and US company Johnson & Johnson (J&J), as well as the Sputnik shots, produced little or no antibodies against Omicron.
Researchers at the University of Washington and Swiss drugmaker Humabs BioMed analysed the efficacy of six vaccines against the highly infectious and most mutated Covid variant. Only three out of 13 people who had taken both doses of Sinopharm’s shot showed neutralising antibodies against Omicron. For J&J, this metric dropped to one out of 12 samples. None of the 11 people fully vaccinated with Sputnik generated such antibodies.
The study, which has been published as a preprint and is yet to be peer-reviewed, also found that the lowest reduction in protective antibodies come from a combination of prior infection and two doses of Pfizer’s mRNA shots. Antibody levels in this sub-set of people dropped five-fold, compared to 44-fold for those who took both the shots from Pfizer but didn’t have a history of Covid-19 infection.
The latest study found that people vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots also generated fewer antibodies. So did those with the viral vector vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca — a finding consistent with other studies that there’s marked loss of protection.
The Bloomberg report said studies earlier this week showed that Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine — one of the most widely used in the world along with the Pfizer-BioNTech shot — also didn’t provide sufficient antibodies after two doses against Omicron and boosters will likely be needed to improve protection.
However, the RDIF said the “small” study deliberately used serum samples that were not representative.
“Conclusions about Sputnik efficacy against Omicron based on wrong serum samples cannot be made. Within the next seven days the Gamaleya Centre will publish its own positive data based on representative serum samples on Omicron neutralisation ability for both Sputnik V vaccine and one-shot Sputnik Light as a booster.
“In other studies with representative samples Sputnik induced a stronger and long-lasting T-cell immunity, showing an 80% efficacy against Delta on months six to eight compared with efficacy of less than 29% demonstrated by mRNA vaccines after six months,” the RDIF said.
Update: Friday December 17
This story has been updated with a response from RDIF to the Bloomberg report.
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