Russia’s advances in the development of a vaccine against coronavirus alarmed the West.
The Russian lead in the development of a vaccine against coronavirus has become not only an unpleasant surprise for the West but an outrageous challenge, both for political and financial reasons. On the one hand, deeply undemocratic Russia simply has no right to make such breakthroughs in complex scientific and technologically advanced fields. On the other hand, a jackpot of such astronomical sizes is at stake, that the thought that it might swim past Western pharmaceutical companies could cause heartburn there.
A pro-Kremlin narrative about the Russian coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V.
There is credible evidence that the Russian government pressed Russian scientists and researchers to be the first to find a vaccine against Covid-19, and did everything at hand to shorten the process, raising concerns about the safety and efficiency of the Sputnik V vaccine. Reservations and criticism of the Sputnik V vaccine are caused by the fact that Russia hasn’t completed large trials to test the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, and the roll-out of an inadequately vetted vaccine could endanger the people who receive it.
The World Health Organisation expressed some reservations about the procedure followed by Russia, initiating talks with Russian authorities about undertaking a review of the vaccine but refusing to endorse it right away. On August 2020, the WHO published a landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines, which considered the Russian project developed by Gamaleya Research Institute as being in Phase 1 of clinical testing.
See similar cases claiming that The West criticises the Russian vaccine because their companies will lose billions of dollars, that The West criticises the Russian vaccine because it can’t accept Russia’s primacy, or that the WHO and Microsoft sabotaged the Russian vaccine against coronavirus, or that UK’s smear campaign aims to discredit Russia’s vaccine, and that Trying to catch up with Russia, the West lost another round in the fight against the pandemic.