Russia has reported 27,403 new coronavirus infections, including 6,868 in Moscow, according to Reuters.
The latest update takes the national total to 2,402,949 since the pandemic began.
Authorities also confirmed 569 deaths related to Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, pushing the official national death toll to 42,176.
Germany’s health minister has called for further restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus in parts of the country where infection numbers are high.
Jens Spahn told ZDF television:
Where there are higher numbers of infections in Germany, in my opinion there is a need for additional measures to reduce the number of contacts beyond what has been agreed.
We still have too many districts and regions where additional measures are still needed.
As countries in the West get hyped for the imminent arrival of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, elsewhere in the world they are getting ready to roll out Russia’s vaccine.
Kazakhstan will this month start producing the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, before beginning a mass vaccination campaign next year, president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s office said on Friday, according to Reuters.
The Central Asian nation will start the campaign by vaccinating doctors, teachers and policemen, the prime minister, Askar Mamin, told the president.
Kazakhstan is also about to start phase III clinical trials of its own vaccine, Mamin said, and will produce 2 million doses of it this month.
The former Soviet republic of 19 million has imposed two lockdowns this year. It has reported 134,706 coronavirus infections, with 1,990 deaths from Covid-19.
The UK medicines regulator has insisted that it approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine without compromising safety, after US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci suggested the approval had been rushed.
Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned the speed at which the UK approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine could undermine confidence in the jab.
He told CBS News that the UK “really rushed through that approval,” adding:
The FDA, the United States of America Food and Drug Administration, is the gold standard of regulation. They are doing it in a careful way, appropriately.
He warned the speed of the approval could damage confidence, telling Sky News:
When we did a survey here in the US, there was a considerable degree of scepticism and reluctance to get vaccinated and we were concerned that if we did anything that looked like it was cutting corners that would feed into the scepticism.
But in a later interview with BBC News, Dr Fauci said he did not mean to “imply any sloppiness”, adding: “I do have great faith in both the scientific community and the…
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