https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/28/europe/russia-coronavirus-vaccine-approval-intl/index.html

Russian vaccine first to approval (by Russia of course.)

So this is it? Vaccine is here?

Well not quite.. not unless you want to inject an unknown Russian cocktail into your veins. As of writing, this vaccine candidate has no publically release data backing it. It is a black box and we don’t know how well it works, IF it works or what side effects it has. The first people who take this vaccine will in effect be test subjects.

We can only hope that Phase II trials to determine that the vaccine is protective against infection from the SARS-Cov2 virus were done and that the vaccine is functional, because the only public news we have about this vaccine is that is passed its phase I trial, ie this vaccine will not kill you if you take it. Not a high bar to pass.

What we can be certain is that this candidate vaccine has not passed its phase III trial yet. Phase III trials take at least a year to conduct and the SARS-Cov2 virus was discovered only in January 2020, 6 going to 7 months ago.The purpose of Phase III trial is to determine the duration of immunity that the vaccine confers (Will it last at least 1 year?) and any medically serious but uncommon side effects. This means not even the Russians know if their vaccine has long term protective ability. As was said, this is a Sputnik moment... it either works or it doesn't and if it doesn’t somebody will have most displeased the Kremlin. I don't envy the head scientist.

Finally, even if the vaccine does work, Russia is only going to make 30 million doses of this vaccine candidate. With a potential of 170 million more produced by foreign partners later this year. This is barely enough for the 144 million Russian population. So even if the vaccine works, it will be of limited supply to Russian allies.. assuming a single dose is all is needed for immunization. The other vaccines all required two doses per person.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-russia-vaccine/russia-to-mass-produce-experimental-covid-19-vaccine-wealth-fund-head-idUSKCN24H1AD

I guess, this news represents a good buying opportunity. If the pattern holds, once people read this, they will panic sell and we can buy shares at a discount. After all, we just experienced a -5% sell off (that mostly recovered) because one supermarket chain in New Zealand, a nation minimally affected by COvid19 (1 case in the past week) decided not to stock TG gloves until the issue of force labour has been resolves (and it was resolved in January 2019, and most of the accusations were done not by Topglove but by the predatory recruitment agencies.).  So how much of a panic sell off can be expected from an untested vaccine of limited production size is anyone's guess.