The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund), and VABIOTECH, one of Vietnam’s leading pharmaceutical companies, announce the production of a test batch of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus.

The first validation samples taken from the produced batch will be shipped to the Gamaleya Center for the quality control. RDIF and VABIOTECH are actively implementing the technology transfer. Sputnik V was granted the approval by the Ministry of Health of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on March 23, 2021.

To date, Sputnik V has been registered in 68 countries with a total population of over 3.7 billion people, which is nearly half of the global population. The data obtained by regulators of a number of countries during the vaccination of the population, including Argentina, Serbia, Bahrain, Hungary, Mexico, UAE, Philippines and others, demonstrates that Sputnik V is one of the safest and most effective vaccines against coronavirus.

Sputnik V is based on a proven and well-studied platform of human adenoviral vectors and uses two different vectors for the two shots in a course of vaccination, providing immunity with a longer duration than vaccines using the same delivery mechanism for both shots.

Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, commented:

RDIF and VABIOTECH are actively cooperating in the technology transfer process to provide easier access to Sputnik V for population of Vietnam. As the pandemic is yet far from over and new, more dangerous variants of coronavirus are being detected in various regions of the world, RDIF is increasing capacities for production of Sputnik V to speed up the vaccination with one of the best vaccines in the world.

Dr. Dat Tuan Do, President of VABIOTECH, said:

It is our great pleasure to work with RDIF to bring Sputnik V to Vietnam to fight the pandemic. We hope the cooperation between RDIF and VABIOTECH will help provide quality and affordable COVID-19 vaccine to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries.