Russian officials say the country is well on its way to completing an Ebola vaccine and will soon be testing in clinical trials.

While the logistics behind the development and testing are unclear, Russian Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs Olga Golodets told the press on Monday that scientists were “about to finish work on developing the vaccine.”

BREAKING: Russia close to completing its Ebola vaccine – Russian Deputy Prime Minister

— RIA Novosti (@ria_novosti) October 13, 2014

Little scientific evidence is publicly available to support Golodets’ claim, but the country’s health minister said at least one vaccine, which is called Triazoverin, will be ready to be tested in Guinea in two months. According to the health ministry, the efficiency of the drug, which is to be tested on the ground, is about 70% to 90%.

“Today we are discussing that we will have enough of Triazoverin vaccine in two months so that we can send them to our personnel in Guinea and test its efficiency in clinical conditions,” Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said, according to Russian news outlet RT.

Triazaverine was reportedly created at the Urals branch of the Academy of Sciences. It was originally developed as a flu vaccine, but has been experimentally used to treat other viruses and has never actually been tested for treatment of Ebola.

“Triazaverine has not been tested against the Ebola virus as the disease was registered only rarely in the past,” one of the medicine’s formulators, Oleg Chupakhin, told Russian state run news outlet ITAR-TASS. “Triazaverine had generated good results against 15 forms of flu, including A/H1N1 (swine flu) and H5N1 (avian flu) at any stage of the disease.”

Skvortsova notes that Triazoverin is one of three vaccines currently under development in Russia. Russian media is reporting that the Triazoverin vaccine will be sent to Guinea to be used in clinical conditions, as it has been effectively used to treat Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.

“We have created three vaccines,” Skvortsova said in an interview with state-run broadcaster Rossiya-1 TV. “One vaccine is based on a strain of Ebola, and the other two have been created by means of genetic engineering.”

Treatments and vaccines are already under trial in the U.S., though no standard treatment protocol currently exists. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said the standard treatment for Ebola remains “supportive therapy.” According to the CDC, the experimental ZMAPP vaccine, given to some patients receiving treatment in the U.S., has not yet been properly tested in clinical trials on humans:

The product is still in an experimental stage, and the manufacturer reports that there is a very limited supply, so it cannot be purchased and is not available for general use. The manufacturer has been planning for phase 1 clinical trials and does not have the capacity to manufacture large quantities of the treatment. The drug has not gone through clinical trials, meaning its safety and effectiveness has not yet been tested in humans.

However, some have called into question why the U.S. vaccine development has fallen on the shoulders of private companies. On Friday, Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, said budget cuts have slowed down medical research in the U.S., and that is why the U.S. doesn’t yet have an Ebola vaccine.

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'” Collins told the Huffington Post. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

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