Abdel Hafiz Nofal
Palestine is grateful to Russia for the opportunity to purchase the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine and expects to receive the first drug in the Middle East. The Ambassador of the country in Moscow Abdel Hafiz Nofal reported this to Lente.ru.
According to the diplomat, over the past two weeks, Palestine and Russia have held intensive discussions on cooperation on the vaccine, during which the Russian side provided all the documents required to register the drug. The Palestinian side, for its part, also did everything to speed up the procedure. “We believe in the Russian vaccine,” Nofal said. “We believe in Russia both in political matters and in technical and medical aspects.”
The ambassador noted that Palestine highly appreciates the opportunity to receive the Russian vaccine. Palestine is proud to be the first state in the Middle East to register the Sputnik V vaccine, he said, and will continue to procure it. “We hope that Palestine will become the first country in the Middle East to receive the Russian vaccine, since we were the first to register it,” the diplomat stressed.
Earlier, the Russian Direct Investment Fund announced that Palestine was the first in the Middle East to register the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine. The drug was approved by the local Ministry of Health without additional clinical trials on the territory of the state.
Sputnik V was developed by the Russian Gamaleya Research Center for Electrochemistry and became the world's first officially registered vaccine against coronavirus. Later, the Russian Ministry of Health registered another drug – EpiVacCorona, developed by the Vector Center of Rospotrebnadzor. On December 5, Moscow started vaccination against coronavirus with Sputnik V. In the United States, they began to inoculate the population with drugs from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna. Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines have been approved in the UK.
