Putin offers WHO experimental Ebola vaccine

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday near Moscow

NEW YORK – At a meeting with World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to send to West Africa a new Russian-developed Ebola vaccine that Moscow claims is highly effective in combating the disease.

"We must act wisely to prevent the spread of this disease among our population," Putin said in the meeting Monday, according to a Voice of Russia UK report.

Chan and Putin met at the official Russian presidential residence Novo-Ogaryovo, just outside of Moscow.

Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said officials in Moscow are discussing sending the vaccine, Triazoverin, in about two months to Russian personnel in Guinea to test its efficiency in humans in clinical conditions.

"The efficiency ranges between 70 and 90 percent, and this is a very good indicator," she said.

As WND reported last month, WHO approved two new experimental Ebola vaccines for expedited testing, neither of which was the Russian drug Triazoverin.

Independently, the Spanish press has reported from Geneva that a group of Russian scientists currently working in Guinea are preparing to test Triazoverin in humans.

“Right now, we have sufficient doses of the vaccine to repeat the experiments using Triazoverin with monkeys, and we are ready to move into clinical trials with human beings,” Skvortsova said, according to a Mexican television news report.

“The full rollout of the Triazoverin vaccine will take several months,” the Russian health minister said.

Skvortsova further explained that Russian scientists in Guinea, assisted by scientists at two virological institutes in Russia, have developed three new experimental Ebola vaccines. One is based on an existing strain of Ebola, while the other two were genetically engineered in the laboratory.

A tweet posted Monday by the Russian news service RIA Novosti confirmed Russia is “close to completing” the Ebola vaccine.

The Russian press has further reported Triazoverin, created at the Urais branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was originally developed as a flu vaccine and has yet to be tested in humans as a treatment for Ebola.

“Triazoverin has not been tested against the Ebola virus as the disease was registered only rarely in the past,” one of the medicine's formulators, Oleg Chupakhin, told Russian state-run news outlet ITAR-TASS. "Triazoverin had generated good results against 15 forms of flu, including A/H1N1 (swine flu) and H5N1 (avian flu) at any stage of the disease."