Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the optimism that we will “achieve this” and “return to normal” has soon been linked to the progression and approval of an effective vaccine against the new coronavirus. Major pharmaceutical corporations, such as Pfizer and Moderna, have conducted clinical trials with various COVID vaccine formulations at control sites around the world for several months. And while some Phase 3 trials are underway and we’re getting closer, there’s still a lot of things to do before a COVID vaccine proves effective, let alone made public.
Meanwhile, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin announced that they had the first approved COVID-19 vaccine in the world. In a segment of Russian state television that would not have seemed out of place in a traveling medical program of the last 19th century, Putin noted that he was so confident with the vaccine that his own daughter had received it. Needless to say, we have a lot of questions about this vaccine and its development. This is what we know, and we don’t know, so far.
(by Russia)
Fortunately, we now have a better formula. As Rachel Fairbank explained in an article on this site in April, the United States has standardized a multi-step testing procedure to ensure that any vaccine that is distributed to millions of people works and does not cause serious harm.
Potential vaccines are tested in human volunteers in these 3 phases:
It turns out that Russia did not feel the need for phase 3 trials, so this new vaccine was approved without this important level of testing. Among the many (many) considerations of scientists, there is a very genuine option that receiving a defective vaccine can make others even more vulnerable to the severe COVID-19 bureaucracy, scientists report. And the only way to get to this serious option is, he guessed it, to conduct more clinical trials with more participants. What Russia decided not to do.
So far, the Russian government has not published any knowledge about the clinical trials it has actually conducted, so we have no evidence that the vaccine is effective in any way, or if there have been serious side effects. Not only this bad science; It is imaginable to do more harm than smart if uncooked vaccines are given to the public.
We know a little more about the vaccine itself. As reported through the New York Times, “it uses two strains of adenovirus that cause mild colds in humans. Scientists changed them genetically to cause inflamed cells to produce proteins from the peak of the new coronavirus, authorities said. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is similar to the vaccine technique developed through the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca and that lately it is undergoing phase 3 trials in Britain, Brazil and South Africa.
But the only data we have to date on the effects of the initial trials of this Russian vaccine come from the country’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, who, according to the New York Times, described the vaccine as effective and noted that “all volunteers have developed maximum levels of antibodies opposed to COVID-19, while none of them have experienced serious vaccination headaches. Putin also intervened with an update on how her daughter was, noting that she had a slightly higher temperature after each dose, but that “now it feels good” so there you have it.
The “vaccine race” is the last recent chance of the existing decathlon measuring the cock between Putin and Donald Trump, who presented his own program to test the science fast – called “Operation Warp Speed” – in May. Obviously, we all need an effective vaccine as soon as possible, but Russia bragably acknowledges that a critical phase of clinical trials has been skipped that does not bode well.
If all this sounds like a cold war, in particular, reminiscent of the mid-century regional race between the USSR and the United States, it is no coincidence. As proof, look only at the call that the Russian vaccine will use in foreign markets: “Sputnik V”. Yes, as in the world’s first synthetic satellite, which it put into orbit through the USSR in 1957, beating the United States at this specific clinical stage. Except in this case, instead of a satellite, they’re launching a potentially harmful vaccine that could worsen a global pandemic.