MOSCOW – A nurse with a needle in my hand asked me sharply if I was ready. I said yes. A quick injection followed, then instructions to wait half an hour in the hospital corridor for the possibility of anaphylactic shock, which fortunately never happened.
Last Monday, I put my doubts aside and received the first dose of Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, called Sputnik V, made in a factory outside Moscow from genetically modified human cold viruses.
Like so much else in Russia, the launch of Sputnik V was entangled in politics and propaganda, with President Vladimir V. Putin announcing its approval for use even before the start of the final stage trials. For months, it was ridiculed by Western scientists. Like many Russian citizens suspicious of the new vaccine, saying that they would wait and see what would happen before catching it themselves, I had my doubts.
Consider what the launch was like: With approval in August, Russian health officials were quick to claim that they had won the vaccine race, just as the country had won the space race decades ago with the Sputnik satellite. In fact, at the time, several other vaccine candidates were in the testing phase.
A series of misleading ads followed. Proponents of the vaccine said that a national inoculation campaign would begin in September, then in November; it increased only last month, not before vaccinations started in Britain and the United States.
Then came the suspicions raised in foreign reports that the Russian government, already aware of medical issues because of accusations of poisoning of dissidents and doping of Olympic athletes, was now fattening the results of vaccine tests, perhaps for reasons of national pride or marketing.
As if it wanted to overcome perceived competition, when Pfizer and German pharmaceutical company BioNTech reported test results showing more than 91 percent effectiveness for their candidate vaccine, the Kremlin-connected financial company supporting Sputnik V said its tests showed 92 percent effectiveness.
When Moderna reported 94.1% effectiveness, the Russian company again claimed superiority, saying it achieved 95%. The authorities later admitted, when the final stage tests were completed, that the results of Sputnik V showed an effectiveness rate of 91.4%.
But, from a recipient’s perspective, does it matter? The reported final result still offers nine out of ten chances to avoid Covid-19, once the vaccine has taken effect. The skepticism of Western experts focused mainly on the questionable initial approval, not on the vaccine project, which is similar to that produced by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca.
Although public apprehension has not subsided completely and developers have not yet released detailed data on adverse events observed during the tests, the Russian government has already vaccinated around one million of its own citizens and exported Sputnik V to Belarus, Argentina and other countries, suggesting that any harmful side effects neglected during the tests would have already come to light.
In the end, the politicized implementation only served to obscure the essentially good results of the test – which appears to be a genuine achievement for Russian scientists who continue a long and historic practice of vaccine development.
In the Soviet period, eliminating infectious diseases was a public health priority at home and exporting vaccines to the developing world, an element of Cold War diplomacy.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most are likely to put medical professionals and residents of long-term care institutions first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of vaccines against coronavirus are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. For now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will not be different from the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none have reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including pain and flu symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before it is destroyed.
The Soviet Union and the United States cooperated in eliminating smallpox through vaccination. Virology was central to the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program, which remained secret long after a 1975 treaty banned weapons.
In 1959, a team of husband and wife of Soviet scientists successfully tested the first live polio vaccine using their own children as the first subjects in the trial. This followed a Russian tradition of medical researchers testing potentially dangerous products on themselves first.
Last spring, Sputnik V’s main developer, Aleksandr L. Gintsburg, followed this custom by injecting himself before the announcement that animal testing was over.
Russian prosecutors compared the vaccine to the Kalashnikov rifle, which is simple and effective in its operation. I was even lucky to avoid some of the common side effects of Sputnik V, such as a severe headache or fever.
With many of my fears relieved, another reason why I chose to be inoculated with a Russian genetic engineering product was more basic: it was available. Russian clinics were not chased by the lines or logistical confusions reported at vaccination sites in the United States and other countries.
In Moscow, the best days of winter arrive in early January, when the country falls asleep on a week-long holiday, traffic decreases and the hectic chaos of the city gives way to a peaceful and snowy beauty. Vaccination sites were also little frequented.
Russia’s vaccination campaign started with medical professionals and teachers and then expanded. It is now open to people over 60 or with underlying conditions that make them vulnerable to more serious illnesses and to people who work on an ever-growing list of professions considered to be at high risk: bank tellers, municipal government employees , professional athletes, bus drivers, police officers and, conveniently for me, journalists. It is not clear whether Russia’s production capacity is sufficient to meet long-term demand.
For now, with so many Russians deeply skeptical about their medical system and the vaccine, there is little outcry for the injection. The first website I visited, during a report in December, closed earlier because few people showed up.
In the capital, the vaccine, paradoxically, attracted educated people, a group that has traditionally been a focus of political opposition to Putin, the main promoter of the vaccine. When it comes to a health decision, many roll up their sleeves.
“I have the second component of Sputnik on my shoulder,” Andrei Desnitsky, an academic at the Institute for Oriental Studies who has been telling his experience with vaccination, wrote on Facebook.
For followers who post comments, he said: “Hysteria in the style of ‘You sold yourself, you bastard, to the bloody regime’ and ‘They consider us all idiots’, will be excluded.”
Like Mr. Desnitsky, I was willing to take a chance. At Polyclinic nº 5, on a snowy morning, I filled out a form asking about chronic diseases, blood disorders or heart problems. I showed my press pass as proof of my profession. A doctor asked some questions about allergies. I waited an hour or so for my turn in a beige-tiled hospital corridor.
Sitting nearby was Galina Chupyl, a 65-year-old city employee. What did she think about being vaccinated?
“I’m happy, of course,” she said. “Nobody wants to be sick.”
I agreed.