MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th May, 2021) A homegrown live polio vaccine has been experimentally proved to be able to prevent the coronavirus disease, the director-general of the Chumakov Center of the Russian academy of Sciences, Aidar Ishmukhametov, said on Wednesday.
Scientists have previously expressed the opinion that Russians had non-specific immunity to COVID-19, that is to say, one-type reactions of the body's immune system to infections. In the 1960s, Soviet virologist Mikhail Chumakov suggested that a live polio vaccine could mitigate the course of the flu. The Chumakov Center, named after the virologist, has now tested this hypothesis regarding the coronavirus.
"We gave about 60 volunteers a live polio vaccine, and as a result, we received a sharp decrease in the incidence in this group. We have proved this issue," Ishmukhametov said on the Rossiya 1 broadcaster.
However, the researchers decided to leave polio vaccination aside for now as a "rapid-response option," he noted.
In the late 1950s, the research center developed the first-ever technology of industrial large-scale production of a live polio vaccine. The large-scale immunization of the entire USSR population kicked off in 1960.
The Chumakov Center has also developed CoviVac, which became the third coronavirus vaccine registered in Russia. The drug is a so-called whole-virion vaccine based on modified SARS-CoV-2 virus that is unable to cause disease but boosts immunity against the coronavirus.
The vaccine was developed from the samples taken from one of the COVID-19 patients in a Moscow hospital. Mass production of the medicine was launched in late March.
