Brazil rejects Sputnik V vaccine, says it’s tainted with replicating cold virushttps://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/brazil-rejects-sputnik-v-vaccine-says-its-tainted-with-replicating-cold-virus/Health regulators in Brazil say that doses of Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine contain a cold-causing virus capable of replicating in human cells.
The unintended presence of the virus in the vaccine can “lead to infections in humans and can cause damage and death, especially in people with low immunity and respiratory problems, among other health problems,” Brazil’s Health Regulatory Agency, Anvisa, said Wednesday in a translated statement.
Russia has unequivocally denied the claim, lobbed legal threats at Anvisa, and accused the respected regulators of being politically motivated to reject the vaccine.
Still, Brazil’s findings raise serious questions about the quality and safety of the vaccine, which is now being used in many countries. The findings also support concerns of Slovak regulators, who said earlier this month that batches of Sputnik V they received did not “have the same characteristics and properties” as the Sputnik V vaccine that was described in a peer-reviewed publication and found to be 91.6 percent effective.
Sputnik V supposedly uses the same virus vector technology as do AstraZeneca and J&J. All use some form of adenovirus to deliver instructions to cells to produce proteins that the recipients' immune systems recognize as foreign and attack. Properly produced, the adenoviruses are rendered unable to reproduce. IIRC, this technology has been in use for a decade or more. With that background, it looks like production quality assurance for the Sputnik V may be lacking. High volume production of ______ is usually a very different challenge than producing engineering prototypes and beta-test production, whether electronics or vaccines.
