THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 19
and error. Research into mRNA vac-
cines—which, in contrast to traditional
vaccines, are synthetic, carrying a por-
tion of a virus’s genetic code—began in
the nineteen-nineties. Though the
mRNA technology was unproved until
last year, it was also tantalizingly simple,
akin to programming a script of com-
puter software. Moderna, a pharmaceu-
tical company founded in 2010 with a
focus on mRNA, created its vaccine pro-
totype during a weekend in January, 2020.
In mid-March, the pharmaceutical giant
Pfizer, working with the German com-
pany BioNTech, came up with twenty
contenders for a vaccine; by early April,
they had been whittled down to four.
Sputnik V—like several other COVID-19
vaccines, developed by Oxford Univer-
sity and AstraZeneca, in the United
Kingdom; CanSino Biologics, in China;
and Johnson & Johnson, in the United
States—is what is known as a vector
vaccine. This type of vaccine is much
newer than the attenuated or inactivated
kind but has a longer track record than
the mRNA variety. In the nineties, sci-
entists began exploring the use of dis-
abled viruses as “vectors,” or carriers for
implanting genetic material into human
cells. Early experiments focussed on
therapies for hemophilia and cystic fibro-
sis, among other genetic diseases. Soon,
pharmaceutical companies and scien-
tific centers around the world began
looking into the potential application
of the technology for vaccines. As Kon-
stantin Chumakov, a Russian-Ameri-
can virologist who is an adviser to the
World Health Organization and a mem-
ber of the Global Virus Network, an in-
ternational coalition that tracks viral
pathogens, explained, the vector is “a
Trojan horse to go in and deliver what-
ever you want.”
At the time of Sputnik V’s approval,
Moderna and Pfizer were months away
from announcing the results of their
Phase III trials or filing for F.D.A. au-
thorization to begin wide-scale vaccina-
tion programs. Scientific experts ex-
pressed concern at the speed with which
the Russian vaccine had been registered
for public use. Anthony Fauci, the direc-
tor of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases, told an ABC
News correspondent, “I hope that the
Russians have actually definitively proven
that the vaccine is safe and effective. I
seriously doubt that they’ve done that.”
Scientists around the world were
speaking of a spirit of unprecedented
collaboration, but an undercurrent of in-
ternational competition was hard to ig-
nore. As Putin crowed about Sputnik V,
President Trump promised an Ameri-
can vaccine as early as the fall. China’s
position as a credible global power ap-
peared to hinge on its role in helping the
world emerge from a pandemic that
began inside its borders. Meanwhile, the
U.K. and the European Union, awaiting
a final Brexit agreement, pursued diver-
gent vaccination strategies. “Sadly, vac-
cine development was politicized every-
where, not only in Russia,” Chumakov
told me. “Everyone wants to be first.”T
he Gamaleya Research Institute of
Epidemiology and Microbiology
started out as a privately held facility, in
the nineteenth century, and, after the
Bolshevik Revolution, was taken over
by the state. It is named for Nikolay
Gamaleya, a physician who apprenticed
under Louis Pasteur and led the newly
formed Soviet government’s campaign
to inoculate citizens against smallpox.
From the street, the institute looks like
any other administrative facility in Mos-
cow, with a brick wall ringing the pe-
rimeter and an unmarked steel door,
beyond which lie several unassuming
two- and three-story buildings. A row
of memorial plaques for renowned Rus-
sian scientists on the façade of the main
building offers the only clue as to what
happens inside.
When I visited one afternoon in
December, I found a world that I had
almost stopped being able to picture.
People strolled from one office to an-
other, pausing to chat; almost no one
wore a mask. In the spring, just as the
pandemic was making landfall in Rus-
sia, researchers had come up with their
prototype vaccine and started adminis-
tering it to themselves; by the time I
made it to the institute, most of its twelve
hundred employees had been vaccinated.
The head of the team that developed
Sputnik V is Denis Logunov, a forty-
two-year-old microbiologist with a fuzzy
beard, the shoulders of a defensive line-
man, and the demeanor of a researcher
who would prefer to busy himself with
experiments rather than to boast of the
results. He and I walked across thesnow-mottled campus of the institute
to his laboratory, where he had overseen
the development of the vaccines for
Ebola and MERS, in addition to Sput-
nik V. There, we put on lab coats and
disposable plastic covers for our shoes.
A sign on the door read “Caution! Bi-
ological Hazard!”
In 2014, after the outbreak of Ebola
in West Africa, Logunov and other Ga-
maleya scientists had set out to create a
vector vaccine using a modified form of
the human adenovirus, which causes the
common cold. That year, Chumakov, the
virologist from the Global Virus Net-
work, visited Logunov and his team, and
was impressed. “I have no questions about
their professional qualities and abilities,”
he told me. “They are certainly not worse
than any of the many other people in-
volved in vaccine development.” In the
summer of 2017, the Gamaleya scientists
sent two thousand doses of the vaccine
to Guinea for a Phase III trial. By then,
the country’s epidemic had largely pe-
tered out, so it wasn’t possible to gauge
its efficacy in a clinical setting as planned.
All the same, Putin claimed that the
Gamaleya vaccine had “proved to be the
most effective in the world.” (It was ap-
proved in Russia, but it has yet to be li-
censed by an international regulatory
body. An Ebola vaccine developed by
Merck was approved by the W.H.O. in
2019, and one by Johnson & Johnson
won the European Commission’s mar-
ket authorization last July.) In 2018, Ga-
maleya developed a vaccine for MERS,
but that outbreak also subsided, and
the vaccine prototype did not reach a
Phase III trial or feature in scientific
journals abroad. As Ilya Yasny, the head
of scientific research at Inbio Ventures,
an investment fund in Moscow, put it,
describing the two earlier would-be suc-
cesses of the institute’s scientists, “We
have to take them at their word.”
I spoke with Alexander Gintsburg,
who has been the director of the Ga-
maleya Institute since 1997, in his wood-
panelled office on campus, and he, too,
cited the success of the Ebola and MERS
vaccines. Gintsburg is sixty-nine years
old, with wire-framed glasses and an
almost cherubic smile, and he exudes a
grandfatherly pride in the work carried
out at the institute. The Ebola vaccine,
he said, had been more than ninety per
cent effective. When I asked him how