Can the single dose Sputnik Light COVID-19 jab be a game changer for India?

Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19

Dr Reddy's Laboratories, the principal partner in India for RDIF declined to comment citing "silent period".  Dr Reddy's had received emergency use approval from DCGI for Sputnik V double dose in April. The company is in the process of rolling out that vaccine. Experts say that a single dose COVID-19 vaccine will help vaccinate twice as many people in the same amount of time, but the long term protection of these vaccines remain unclear, without the backing of robust clinical efficacy data.

"Maybe all adenovirus vaccines are inducing maximal effect with the first dose (at least for short term protection) and only J&J decided to go with one," said Dr Gagandeep Kang, renowned virologist.

"If any single dose vaccine is licensed based on robust clinical efficacy data we can accept it and do real world evaluation of extent and duration of protection," Kang said.

"A single-dose vaccine would have benefit over a two-dose vaccine in that it could be administered to twice as many people in the same amount of time and vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible is key to controlling the outbreak," said  Michael Breen, Director, Infectious Diseases and Ophthalmology at GlobalData Healthcare at GlobalData.

Breen added that the data from a single dose of Sputnik V (Sputnik light) are not dissimilar from a single dose of Pfizer/BioNTech's or Moderna's vaccines, or even AZ's vaccine, and indeed some places are spacing out the doses for these vaccines in order to rapidly vaccinate as many people as possible.

"It should be noted that these developers have not sought approval as a single dose, and this is likely driven by the fact that long-term protection from a single dose is unclear, and likely not to be as durable as two doses. So from a long-term standpoint, Sputnik Light is not ideal, but in terms of rapidly controlling the outbreak, with a second dose to come later, it's very promising," Breen said.

Essentially it will use the same production capacity that exists. India is the leading production hub for Sputnik V. RDIF has reached agreements with the leading pharmaceutical companies in the country such as Gland Pharma, Hetero Biopharma, Panacea Biotec, Stelis Biopharma, Virchow Biotech aimed at production of more than 850 million doses per year. About half of these doses can be used as a single dose vaccine.