Argentine pharmaceutical company Richmond said it has produced more than 5 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.
“We have produced more than 5 million doses in Argentina, including the batch that was released yesterday. We have so far produced 1,179,625 doses of component I and 3,890,000 doses of component II,” the company said on Twitter.
Sputnik V, manufactured in Argentina, first entered circulation in the country in the first week of August after quality approval from the Russian Gamaleya Institute.
Argentina became the third country after Russia and Belarus to use Sputnik V. On December 23, 2020, the Argentine regulator issued a permit for the emergency use of the drug, and already on December 29, medical workers began to be inoculated in the republic. In June, Richmond began local production of Sputnik V using an active ingredient that is shipped from the Russian Federation.
Sputnik V is approved in 70 countries with a total population of 4 billion people, which is more than 50% of the world’s population. Sputnik V ranks second in the world in terms of the number of approvals received by government regulators. The effectiveness of the vaccine was 97.6% according to the analysis of data on 3.8 million vaccinated Russians, which is higher than the data previously published by the medical journal The Lancet (91.6%), the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and the Gamaleya Research Center reported earlier.