THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 21
els of antibodies, and the vaccinated an-
imals did not become ill.
In April, Logunov and a number of
his colleagues in the lab administered
the vaccine to themselves. “When you
are a researcher, you are effectively going
into the red zone,” he said. “You simply
need to protect yourself.” He went on,
“It was also thrilling to have the chance
to test your technology, to see how it
performs in battle.” When I spoke to
Gintsburg, he told me that he had given
the vaccine not only to himself and to
many of his employees but also to his
wife, his daughter, and his granddaugh-
ter. I asked whether he felt that he was
taking a gamble. “Without excitement,
it’s impossible to work, to create,” he said.
“As a scientist, you should always have
the desire to learn, to find things out.”
O
n April 20th, in a videoconference,
Putin told his Cabinet that he
would “like to hear about progress on a
vaccine against the virus,” taking care
to note “the colossal responsibility for
the outcome that its developers must
shoulder.” Gintsburg was among the
scientists on the call, and he informed
Putin of the vaccine created at Gama-
leya, which had undergone the first
round of animal testing, producing the
antibodies necessary to “defend against
rather high doses of COVID-19.” Putin
was impressed. “What you’ve told me
is very important, and very interesting,”
he said.
Dmitriev, the head of the R.D.I.F.,
the sovereign wealth fund that backs
Sputnik V, told me that he and his col-
leagues had studied as many as twenty
potential vaccines from various Russian
research organizations, including a num-
ber of high-profile state laboratories.
“Why did we choose the vaccine from
Gamaleya Institute?” he asked. “The
safest vaccine, and one that has been
researched for decades, is the human
adenovirus vaccine.” In fact, although
viral vectors have been the subject of
countless studies and scientific papers,
only one adenovirus-based vaccine, the
first shot of Johnson & Johnson’s Ebola
regimen, had seen wide public use be-
fore Russia approved Sputnik V.
Last fall, the Oxford-AstraZeneca
vaccine ran into a number of difficul-
ties in its testing and rollout. Research-
ers suspended Phase III trials after a
U.K. participant became ill, but failed
to properly notify the F.D.A.; as a re-
sult, the American trial was postponed
for six and a half weeks. In October, the
Times of London published a report
outlining a Russian disinformation cam-
paign that was “designed to undermine
and spread fear about the Oxford Uni-
versity coronavirus vaccine.” The report
linked comments made by Dmitriev, in
which he referred to it as a “monkey
vaccine,” to a segment on Russian tele-
vision that suggested that the vaccine
could turn humans into apes. The U.K.’s
foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, pub-
licly complained about Dmitriev’s choice
of language; Dmitriev has since avoided
using the phrase. When I spoke to him
in December, he dismissed the notion
that he had been motivated by geopo-
litical competition. “We don’t aspire to
be the primary vaccine in the world but,
rather, part of a portfolio of vaccines,”
he said. Still, he couldn’t resist a dig at
his competitors. “There are generally no
long-term studies of either mRNA vac-
cines or chimpanzee ones,” he said.
Dmitriev is a well-connected banker.
In the nineties, he studied at Stanford
and Harvard, and he worked at Mc-
Kinsey and Goldman Sachs before build-
ing a career as a financier in Russia. His
wife, Natalia Popova, is the deputy di-
rector of Innopraktika, the scientific in-
stitute tied to a $1.5-billion project to
build a technology hub at Moscow State
University. The institute is led by Kat-
erina Tikhonova, who is widely reported
to be Putin’s daughter; in the early two-
thousands, Popova and Tikhonova at-
tended the university together. (Most
observers assumed that, when Putin re-
ferred to the daughter who was vaccinated,
he meant Tikhonova.) In a segment that
aired on a state television channel in Au-
gust, Popova tours Logunov’s laboratory
at the Gamaleya Institute; she also in-
terviews Dmitriev over video chat, with-
out noting that they are married. “It’s
still unclear where the coronavirus came
from, but Russia can be the place where
it is defeated,” she declares.
Speaking of his choice of name for
the vaccine, Dmitriev said, “We simply
had the idea of choosing a Russian word
that the rest of the world already knows.”
Gintsburg acknowledged that the name
was chosen “with competition in the
international arena in mind.” But, he
added, “even if, for the general popula-
tion, this has some meaning, it doesn’t
matter at all for the purposes of science.”
Logunov insisted that it wasn’t pol-
itics but the extraordinary circumstances
of a global pandemic that called for a
departure from traditional procedures.
“If we have something that is proved to
be safe and that has the chance to save
“Honey, come look at the lasagna I built.”
• •
