Moscow will deal with winner of U.S. elections

U.S.-Russia relations are at a low point, according to the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who informed CNBC that Moscow wanted to deal with the next U.S. president to enhance things.

Russia has yet to formally acknowledge Democrat Joe Biden as the U.S. president-elect and has stated it will just do so as soon as a main outcome is verified, which might take a while offered legal fights introduced by existing President Donald Trump and the possibility of a number of vote re-counts. While Trump declines to yield, Biden is pressing forward with his shift strategy and called Trump’s absence of concession “an embarrassment.”

However, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of RDIF (the Russian Direct Investment Fund), repeated remarks from the Kremlin’s representative previously today, and stated that “the votes need to be finally counted” prior to Russia acknowledges the winner of the election.

“Russia will work with whoever gets elected as president of the U.S. and we are at a low point in U.S.-Russia relations, we want to improve them, so we’ll work with anybody who wants to work with Russia and improve a relationship that is so important for the rest of the world,” Dmitriev informed CNBC’s Capital Connection Thursday.

The unpleasant shift of power at the top of the world’s biggest economy likewise comes as the coronavirus pandemic continues to strike difficult around the globe.

The U.S., which now has more than 10 million verified cases of the infection, set a brand-new high for the seven-day average of everyday Covid infections of 121,153 on Tuesday, a 33% increase from a week earlier, according to a CNBC analysis of information from Johns Hopkins University.  Meanwhile, Russia has actually taped over 1.8 million coronavirus infections, according to JHU.

Hopes that a coronavirus vaccine will quickly be presented were raised on Monday after U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech BioNTech revealed that the Covid-19 vaccine prospect they had actually established seemed more than 90% reliable. Hopes were raised even more when Moderna revealed on Wednesday night that its Covid vaccine stage 3 trial had actually accumulated enough cases of the coronavirus to send the initial outcomes to an independent security tracking board.

Meanwhile, Russia, which was the very first nation worldwide to sign up a coronavirus vaccine in August, revealed on Wednesday that its coronavirus vaccine was 92% reliable at avoiding individuals from getting Covid-19, based upon interim trial outcomes.

RDIF, which is backing the vaccine’s advancement and circulation, stated the trials examined its effectiveness amongst over 16,000 volunteers who got the vaccine or placebo 21 days after the very first injection (like Pfizer’s vaccine, Russia’s one includes 2 different dosages). The trial examined 20 verified cases of the coronavirus amongst those individuals to reach its conclusions on the effectiveness of its vaccine.

In contrast, the Pfizer/BioNTech analysis was based upon 94 verified Covid-19 infections amongst its trial’s 43,538 individuals. A trial needs to strike a target variety of infections prior to information is released, as it reveals the infection in present in those getting the vaccine or placebo.

RDIF stated Russia’s interim trial outcomes would be released “in one of the leading international peer-reviewed medical journals,” however did not suggest when this may be.

Asked whether the analysis of 20 verified Covid cases who was too little a sample size, RDIF’s Dmitriev stated medical procedure determined that this number was when the very first interim information “checkpoint” was activated.

“We’re very cautiously optimistic about the data” Dmitriev informed CNBC. “It’s very important that it’s data speaking rather than Russia speaking.”

He included that the next checkpoint — of the effectiveness of the vaccine — would be when 39 contaminated individuals were examined.

“So we’ll keep the world posted, but we believe it’s of course very good data because even 50% efficiency is considered to be good. And anything above 90% is great,” he stated.

“We’re very happy about Pfizer results, we know Moderna results will be coming out soon. We want all the vaccines to be successful, the world needs successful vaccines.”

– CNBC’s Abigail Ng contributed reporting to this story.