kirill dmitriev in moscow, welcome to hardtalk. thank you, stephen.t with the project which has occupied so much of your time and energy in recent months. that is the development of the sputnik v vaccine, which your investment fund has effectively financed. how satisfied are you with what you've achieved? well, i think we really created a vaccine for humankind and we actually call it the sputnik v, not sputnik five and that is just one of the smallest misunderstandings that we've seen in the history of the vaccine, because it is recognised, including the lancet publication, as having one of the most efficient vaccines in the world — with efficacy more than 90%. that's a safe vaccine based on human viral vector and being able to be stored at refrigerator — ordinary refrigerator — temperature, which makes it very easy for logistics as well as being very affordable, so we are very pleased, and the world, we understand, is pleased as well. you worked with the gamaleya institute and their scientists have clearly worked very hard on this, but what the world

stephen, i did hearyour interview of kirill on this topic, and i have to say that the original data that phase 1—2 study, and they licenced the product. we at that point said, "gee, we'd love to see what the basis is behind that and look at the data." we didn't get data. at the end, in my world, data speaks. let me explain why that's important. if there is a bad effect from a vaccine, it won't only poison that vaccine, it will affect all vaccines. what we need is transparency of data, we need to make sure the products are made properly and meet global standards, and i'm not going to apologise for that because if you don't do that, you put at risk the whole enterprise of vaccines, which by the way, has been able to reduce child mortality by 50% in the last 20 years and reduce vaccine—preventable diseases by 70%. because we can get these vaccines out and people trust them. you know a lot about delivering vaccines and persuading people to take them and you know trust is a very important issue here. how damaging is it when you hear politicians, and i'm going to quote several from different p

here's more from kirill dmitriev.rget about them and really focus on our vaccine being one of the best, because there are only three vaccines with efficacy of more than 90%. sputnik works in a similar way to the oxford astrazeneca vaccine. newly released data shows that has an effectiveness of 82%. and both offer complete protection against hospitalisation and death from covid—19. these vaccines use a cold—type virus, engineered to be harmless, to deliver a fragment of coronavirus to the body. it makes the immune system primed to fight the virus if it encounters it for real. it's also relatively inexpensive to produce and doesn't need to be stored at super—cold temperatures. but russia still needs to make it at scale, and that's where it may face difficulties. as our health correspondent jim reed explains. this vaccine is different from others in that it needs two doses, but both those doses are slightly different, that is deliberate, to provoke a stronger immune response but it makes the production more complicated,