Russia's vaccine to cost less than $20 per person

Financial backers and developers of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine said Tuesday that the shot will cost less than $20 per person - and Moscow aims to produce more than a billion doses at home and abroad next year.

The vaccine is administered in two shots, each of which will cost less than $10, according to the official Sputnik V Twitter account.

For Russian citizens though, inoculation will be free of charge.

But on the streets of Moscow, some are still wary.

"I don’t want to be vaccinated at all. But possibly I would have chosen the Russian vaccine if I wanted to. But at the moment I did not even think about it.''

Mass vaccination in Russia, which has the world's fifth-highest number of COVID-19 cases, has yet to begin, as so-called Phase III clinical trials continue.

The Russian vaccine is cheaper than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine but more expensive than the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.