russia may be vaccine undermine immunize

#Russia may be vaccine undermine immunize trial#

In mid-March, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, working with the German company BioNTech, came up with twenty contenders for a vaccine by early April, they had been whittled down to four. Moderna, a pharmaceutical company founded in 2010 with a focus on mRNA, created its vaccine prototype during a weekend in January, 2020. Though the mRNA technology was unproved until last year, it was also tantalizingly simple, akin to programming a script of computer software. Research into mRNA vaccines-which, in contrast to traditional vaccines, are synthetic, carrying a portion of a virus’s genetic code-began in the nineteen-nineties.

#Russia may be vaccine undermine immunize trial#

Developing such vaccines is a tricky process of trial and error. Attenuated vaccines, such as those for measles, mumps, and rubella, involve weakening a virus to non-dangerous strength inactivated vaccines, as in most flu shots, render it inert. In the past, it has taken years, even decades, to bring new vaccines to market. With little public data about Sputnik V, the question arose: Was it a scientific breakthrough or the dubious result of a rushed process? Gamaleya scientists had produced vaccines for Ebola and MERS (the respiratory illness, similar to COVID-19, that emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012), but neither had been widely employed or authorized for use outside Russia. Before the pandemic, the institute did not have a particularly high profile.

Sputnik V was developed at the Gamaleya Institute, in Moscow. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. Russia will have got there first.” Russian officials, including Mikhail Murashko, the country’s health minister, called Sputnik V “the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus infection.” A news anchor on Rossiya-1 proclaimed, “Just like sixty-plus years ago, headlines around the world again feature the Russian word ‘Sputnik.’ ” The Russian vaccine represented, the anchor said, a “turning point in the fight against the pandemic.” Putin praised the scientists responsible: “We owe our gratitude to those who have taken this first, very important step for Russia and the entire world.” in 1957, “Americans were surprised when they heard Sputnik’s beeping. (The “V” stands for “vaccine.”) As he told CNN in late July, referring to the world’s first satellite, launched by the U.S.S.R. In speaking about Sputnik V, Dmitriev did not shy away from the history of superpower rivalry that the name evoked. The vaccine’s name was the brainchild of Kirill Dmitriev, the director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (R.D.I.F.), the sovereign wealth fund that is the vaccine’s chief lobbyist and financial backer. An influential cultural figure who received the vaccine in August told me that he had “heard about it from people who pay attention and are careful.” He went on, “It felt a bit adventurous, but, the way the pandemic was going, I thought I’d give it a try.” She’d had a slight fever afterward, he reported, but it had passed in a day or two. In the Cabinet meeting, Putin mentioned that one of his daughters had been vaccinated. Still, Sputnik V had already begun to make its way through Russian society. In fact, Russian scientists hadn’t published any data from their Phase I and Phase II trials, which test a vaccine’s safety and potential for efficacy among a limited number of volunteers, and hadn’t even started Phase III, which tests the vaccine in a much larger group of volunteers, using a placebo as a control.

The vaccine, Putin noted, is “quite effective, helps develop immunity, and has gone through all the necessary trials.” The meeting’s ostensible agenda was the government’s preparations for the school year ahead, but the real news came in Putin’s opening remarks, when he revealed that Russia had granted approval to Sputnik V, the country’s first vaccine against COVID-19. The proceedings were broadcast on state television, and had the wooden quality of reality TV. The ministers’ faces, stern yet deferential, populated a large screen in front of Putin’s desk-the Kremlin’s version of a pandemic Zoom call. One morning last August, Vladimir Putin, isolated at his Presidential residence in the forest outside Moscow, held a videoconference with his Cabinet.