22 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
a person, it’s unethical not to try and do
so,” he said. Others were less sure. Svet-
lana Zavidova, the head of a trade group
that represents multinational pharma-
ceutical companies working in Russia,
told me, “Like in a slalom race, you have
to pass through certain gates along the
way. We decided to just zoom straight
downhill so as to save time. We cut past
and then said, ‘Now give us a medal.’”
Yasny, the scientist from Inbio Ventures,
said, “I have no complaints directed to-
ward the employees of Gamaleya Insti-
tute but, rather, to politicians, bureau-
crats, and the press. Everything could
have been fine if there hadn’t been all
this hype and lack of transparency.”
Judy Twigg, a global-public-health
expert at Virginia Commonwealth Uni-
versity, agreed. “Russia didn’t do itself
any favors by registering Sputnik V be-
fore they had Phase III data,” she said.
Given the country’s track record of ma-
nipulation and obfuscation, any Rus-
sian vaccine was destined to face height-
ened skepticism. In recent years, Russia
has been accused, credibly, of doping its
Olympic athletes and of poisoning en-
emies, such as the former spy Sergei
Skripal and the opposition leader Alexei
Navalny, with banned nerve agents.
Dmitriev said that he wasn’t fazed, or
even all that surprised, by the mistrust
the vaccine had been met with. “No
matter what Russia does, it will be crit-
icized, that’s a given,” he told me. In a
segment that aired on “The Daily Show”
in September, a narrator with an exag-
gerated Russian accent asked the audi-
ence, “Are you afraid COVID-19 will kill
you before Putin has a chance to? Then
try Mother Russia’s new COVID-19 vac-
cine.” He goes on, “It is guaranteed safe
and effective. How do we know? Be-
cause it was tested on a bear—by a sci-
entist who was also a bear.”I
n early September, Logunov and his
colleagues published the results from
Sputnik V’s combined Phase I and II
trials in The Lancet. There were only
seventy-six participants—about the same
number as in the equivalent trials by
Pfizer, but fewer than in Moderna’s,
which had several hundred volunteers,
or in Oxford-AstraZeneca’s, which had
more than a thousand. All the partici-
pants had produced large quantities of
antibodies and infection-fighting T cells,
and no one had become infected or de-
veloped serious side effects. The authors
wrote that the vaccine was “safe, welltolerated, and induces strong humoral
and cellular immune responses.”
Three days later, an open letter, which
has since been signed by almost forty
scientists, mostly from prominent West-
ern research centers, pointed out a num-
ber of supposed irregularities with the
data. Most significant, the reported an-
tibody levels of participants looked
strangely similar. “On the ground of
simple probabilistic evaluations the fact
of observing so many data points pre-
served among different experiments is
highly unlikely,” the letter read. One of
its signatories, a Russian-born molec-
ular biologist at Northwestern Univer-
sity named Konstantin Andreev, told
me, “We weren’t saying whether the
vaccine is good or bad, safe or unsafe.
Our objection wasn’t really to the vac-
cine per se but to how the researchers
carried out their study. At minimum, it
was sloppy; at most, it was manipu-
lated.” The signers of the letter requested
the raw data from the trials so that they
could draw their own conclusions.
Logunov and his co-authors replied
in The Lancet, saying that any repetitive
figures were the result of simple coin-
cidence, the small number of partici-
pants, and lab instruments that distrib-
ute values into discrete clusters. They
declined to provide the raw data. Lo-
gunov told me that to give such infor-
mation to anyone who asked for it would
be a distraction, and a violation of the
norms and practices of modern phar-
maceutical development. “There are
seven billion people on earth, and it’s
impossible to present every data point
to everyone,” he said. “No one works
this way.”
The Gamaleya immunologists had
some defenders in the West. Naor Bar-
Zeev, a professor of international health
and vaccine sciences at Johns Hopkins
University, and one of the peer review-
ers for the original Lancet paper, sup-
ported its publication and felt that it had
been written “thoughtfully and care-
fully.” He was persuaded by the Gama-
leya scientists’ explanations. If you set
out to identify suspicious patterns, he
said, you easily can. “They accused Ga-
maleya of selectively reporting certain
results, but, by selectively highlighting
supposed similarities in the data, they
were essentially doing the same thing.”
In my conversations with scientific ex-“No need to bring them in—they’re indoor-outdoor rocks.”