18 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
LETTER FROMMOSCOW
FIVE-MONTH PLAN
When the pandemic struck, Russia set out to beat the West to a vaccine.
BYJOSHUAYAFFA
ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO
O
ne morning last August, Vladimir
Putin, isolated at his Presidential
residence in the forest outside Moscow,
held a videoconference with his Cabi-
net. The ministers’ faces, stern yet def-
erential, populated a large screen in front
of Putin’s desk—the Kremlin’s version
of a pandemic Zoom call. The proceed-
ings were broadcast on state television,
and had the wooden quality of reality
TV. The meeting’s ostensible agenda
was the government’s preparations for
the school year ahead, but the real news
came in Putin’s opening remarks, when
he revealed that Russia had granted ap-
proval to Sputnik V, the country’s first
vaccine against COVID-19. The vaccine,
Putin noted, is “quite effective, helps de-
velop immunity, and has gone through
all the necessary trials.”
In fact, Russian scientists hadn’t pub-
lished any data from their Phase I and
Phase II trials, which test a vaccine’s
safety and potential for efficacy among
a limited number of volunteers, and
hadn’t even started Phase III, which
tests the vaccine in a much larger group
of volunteers, using a placebo as a con-
trol. Still, Sputnik V had already begun
to make its way through Russian soci-
ety. In the Cabinet meeting, Putin men-
tioned that one of his daughters had
been vaccinated. She’d had a slight fever
afterward, he reported, but it had passed
in a day or two. “She’s feeling well,” he
said. An influential cultural figure who
received the vaccine in August told me
that he had “heard about it from peo-
ple who pay attention and are careful.”
He went on, “It felt a bit adventurous,
but, the way the pandemic was going, I
thought I’d give it a try.”
The vaccine’s name was the brain-
child of Kirill Dmitriev, the director of
the Russian Direct Investment Fund
(R.D.I.F.), the sovereign wealth fund
that is the vaccine’s chief lobbyist and
financial backer. In speaking about Sput-
nik V, Dmitriev did not shy away from
the history of superpower rivalry that
the name evoked. (The “V” stands for
“vaccine.”) As he told CNN in late July,
referring to the world’s first satellite,
launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1957, “Amer-
icans were surprised when they heard
Sputnik’s beeping. It’s the same with
this vaccine. Russia will have got there
first.” Russian officials, including Mikhail
Murashko, the country’s health minis-
ter, called Sputnik V “the first vaccine
against the novel coronavirus infection.”
A news anchor on Rossiya-1 proclaimed,
“Just like sixty-plus years ago, headlines
around the world again feature the Rus-
sian word ‘Sputnik.’ ” The Russian vac-
cine represented, the anchor said, a
“turning point in the fight against the
pandemic.” Putin praised the scientists
responsible: “We owe our gratitude to
those who have taken this first, very
important step for Russia and the en-
tire world.”
Sputnik V was developed at the Ga-
maleya Institute, in Moscow. Before the
pandemic, the institute did not have a
particularly high profile. Gamaleya sci-
entists had produced vaccines for Ebola
and MERS (the respiratory illness, sim-
ilar to COVID-19, that emerged in Saudi
Arabia in 2012), but neither had been
widely employed or authorized for use
outside Russia. With little public data
about Sputnik V, the question arose:
Was it a scientific breakthrough or the
dubious result of a rushed process?
In the past, it has taken years, even
decades, to bring new vaccines to mar-
ket. Attenuated vaccines, such as those
for measles, mumps, and rubella, involve
weakening a virus to non-dangerous
strength; inactivated vaccines, as in most
flu shots, render it inert. Developing
“Everyone wants to be first,” the virologist Konstantin Chumakov said. such vaccines is a tricky process of trial PHOTOGRAPHS: ALAIN NOGUES / SYGMA / GETTY (BUILDINGS); GETTY (OTHER)
