DISINFO: In the West, the Sputnik V vaccine was targeted by an aggressive denigration campaign
SUMMARY
To undermine the prestige that Russia achieved by patenting the first anti-COVID-19 vaccine in the world, the Sputnik V vaccine was targeted by an aggressive denigration campaign based on widespread anti-Russian stereotypes. It was sometimes openly subjected to derision.
RESPONSE
Recurring disinformation narratives about an ongoing campaign of the West to discredit the Russian Sputnik V vaccine aiming to promote the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.
The article claims that Sputnik V was targeted by a “campaign of denigration”, including open derision, based on “widespread stereotypes”, which the article implicitly suggests were anti-Russian stereotypes.
The claim that the West has promoted a campaign to discredit the Russian Sputnik V vaccine in order to undermine Russia’s prestige for being the first country to develop an anti-COVID-19 vaccine is not supported by factual evidence.
The announcement of the start of vaccination of the Russian population came at a time when the vaccine was in fact still in the experimental phase, raising questions also within the Russian scientific community.
The lack of shared data and information on the development of Sputnik V, the opaqueness surrounding this process and the lack of effective testing, caused legitimate concerns in the international scientific community and have made it difficult for Western scientists to assess the work behind the development of this vaccine.
Questions about Sputnik V were motivated not by “anti-Russian stereotypes” but by widespread concerns that the approval of the vaccine was premature, since, at the time, the vaccine had not even started phase III trials, nor had any results on the earlier stage trials been published. The WHO expressed concerns about the preternatural registration of vaccine.
From the initial phase of vaccine development through to the subsequent phases, Russia was repeatedly called upon to share data on the Sputnik V vaccine and the medical trials. Emergency use authorisation was nevertheless obtained in various countries despite phase III trials of the vaccine had yet to be completed.
Some concerns about the vaccine were addressed in an interim study published in February 2021 by the British scientific journal The Lancet, which assessed that Sputnik V is 91.6% effective vaccine and is highly tolerated and effective for all age groups.
The vaccine has not yet been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is currently conducting a rolling review illustrating the normal, professional approach in this matter.
Read similar cases claiming that the West aims to intensify its campaign against the Sputnik V vaccine, that previous Western criticism of the Sputnik V vaccine was due to Russophobia, that the European Union turned out to be an organisation with no strategy at all, attacking Sputnik V just because it is Russian