Local pharmaceutical company Lamar International has offered to supply the government with 15-million doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, its CEO said on Monday.
“We want to supply the government and quickly,” Jerome Smith told Business Day. If approved by SA’s medicines regulator, 15-million doses of Sputnik V could be delivered by May, he said, declining to disclose the price at which the vaccine had been offered.
Smith is the former CEO of generic pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla Medpro, which was subsequently bought by Indian generic drugmaker Cipla.
Lamar partnered with Russia’s Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology to submit a registration application to the SA Health Products Regulatory Authority, said Smith.
A presentation made to the cabinet lekgotla by the health department on January 28 indicates as many as 23-million doses of Sputnik V could potentially be secured for SA.
Preliminary results of a large phase 3 trial of Sputnik V were published in The Lancet last week, showing it was 91.6% effective, placing it in the same league as the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
Russia’s announcement in August 2020 that it had cleared the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine was met with widespread scepticism due to a lack of safety trials. The Lancet study has boosted its credibility and at least 20 countries have approved it for use, Bloomberg reported this week.
However, local researchers have cautioned that the vaccine was tested only in male volunteers in Moscow and no research has been published on the shot’s impact on people living with HIV/Aids. Nor is there any clinical evidence that it protects people from the new variant 501Y.V2, which emerged in SA late in 2020, although this is an issue that the Gamaleya Institute is investigating.
Lamar is also moving into the Covid-19 treatment market and has been granted approval by the regulator to import ivermectin for human use. The drug is currently only registered for animal use in SA, but the medicines regulator announced in January that it would permit doctors to prescribe it under a tightly controlled “compassionate use” programme.
Ivermectin is a cheap, off-patent anti-parasitic drug that has piqued the interest of researchers as a potential treatment for Covid-19, but regulators around the world have consistently said there is not yet enough data to confirm its safety and efficacy.
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