The US and Europe are demonising Belarusian authorities. They assert that Belarus is the source of threat for regional and international security. The aim of it is to justify any actions against Minsk.
Summary
A disinformation campaign against the Sputnik V vaccine was ordered by the Western pharmaceutical transnational big pharma, which include 30 of the world's leading pharmaceutical manufacturers, whose headquarters are primarily in the United States and Western European countries: Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, all of which have released their own COVID-19 vaccines.
From the beginning, there was a campaign to undermine confidence in the great achievement of Russian scientists, in the efficacy of the vaccine. There are attacks against Sputnik V mainly in the Anglo-Saxon press; it is a kind of octopus that combines the interests of the big pharma and various political actors who are opposed to Russia. The campaign aims to reduce the vaccination rate in Russia itself.
Since the end of last year, Russian authorities have repeatedly announced attempts by Western countries to discredit Sputnik V. In December, the official representative of the Russian Defence Ministry, Igor Konashenkov, said that Moscow knows in detail what funds and what resources have been launched from abroad to discredit the national vaccine in the world and in Russia. In March, a Sputnik source in the Kremlin reported that the United States and its allies, through controlled non-governmental organizations, were preparing for a large-scale disinformation campaign.
Disproof
Recurring disinformation narrative about an ongoing campaign of the West to discredit the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and the promotion of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. In this case, this disinformation message aims to cover for the exceptionally low rates of immunisation in Russia (where on early June 2021 only 9 percent of its adult population had received the vaccine despite it being free and available for all age ranges) and for lagging behind the West in its vaccination drive.
Claims about Western smear campaigns against the Russian Sputnik V vaccine are a regular occurrence in pro-Kremlin media, but they are not supported by factual evidence. Early remarks about Sputnik V was motivated by widespread concerns that the approval 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. After the results of phase I and II trials were published in The Lancet in September 2020, a group of international experts analysed them and expressed concerns about statistical anomalies. The same happened after the publication of the results of phase III, whose data discrepancies were again publicly highlighted by scientists.
Actually, the opposite is true: pro-Kremlin disinformation has been targeting Western vaccines with the aim of discrediting them, especially Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech.
See other examples in our database, such as claims that the EMA deliberately delays the registration of Sputnik V due to political or economic reasons, that the EU is preparing to falsely accuse Russia of anti-vax activities, that the West is preparing large scale smear actions including fake footage of mass patient deaths, that the West criticises the vaccine because it can’t accept Russia’s primacy, or that the WHO and Microsoft sabotaged Sputnik V.