24 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
the cold chain needed to transport the
Pfizer vaccine, stated their preference for
Sputnik V. That month, after Hungary
accused the E.U. of being too slow in its
vaccine rollout, the country approved
Sputnik V, becoming the first in the E.U.
to do so. (E.U. officials criticized Hun-
gary for undermining European solidar-
ity.) Such deals, Twigg pointed out, could
pave the way for further diplomatic and
commercial ties. “Russia could translate
this reputational gain into other types of
successes,” she said.
Sputnik V forged its most intrigu-
ing international collaboration in mid-
December, when AstraZeneca said that
it would test a two-shot combination
of its vector vaccine with Sputnik V’s
adenovirus-26 component. The com-
pany explained that combining vaccines
“may be an important step in generating
wider protection through a stronger im-
mune response and better accessibility.”
Brazil is also considering Sputnik V, but it
has delayed its approval until Russia pro-
vides additional details on its trial pro-
tocol and its manufacturing process.
Recently, international researchers
have raised concerns about new strains
of the coronavirus, particularly the South
African variant, which carries a mutated
spike protein that may help the virus by-
pass immune protection. Moderna an-
nounced that it was testing a “booster
shot.” Gushchin told me that Sputnik V’s
“protective efficacy may be reduced, but
likely only by a little bit.” Even if the
virus did manage to get past a vaccinated
person’s antibodies, he explained, the
T cell immune response should prevent
that person from getting sick. “We’re
looking into it,” he said.
O
n December 2nd, the U.K. issued
emergency-use authorization to the
Pfizer vaccine. Not to be outdone, Putin
announced the civilian rollout of Sput-
nik V hours later. The inoculation would
begin in Moscow, with health-care work-
ers and others who had a high risk of
exposure, including teachers and social
workers. A poll taken in September, how-
ever, had shown that up to half of Rus-
sian doctors and other medical profes-
sionals weren’t yet willing to get the
vaccine, owing to the rushed approval
process and a lack of concrete data about
the safety and efficacy of Sputnik V. The
Levada Center, an independent polling
and research organization based in Mos-
cow, found that, as of December, nearly
sixty per cent of Russians did not wish
to be vaccinated. (At the time, polls in
the United States indicated that about
a quarter of the population did not want
to be vaccinated; in France, which has
one of the largest anti-vax movements
in Europe, the number hovered around
fifty per cent.)
Denis Volkov, the deputy director of
the Levada Center, told me, after attend-
ing a series of focus groups in Russia, “It
seems that many people have no fear of
getting infected. They consider this whole
coronavirus topic some kind of non-
sense.” In late December, the head of
Russia’s coronavirus task force acknowl-
edged that there might have been as
many as a hundred and eighty thousand
deaths in the country from COVID-19,
three times the official tally, which would
make it the third-highest number of any
country in the world. Those losses are
not widely covered in the media or fre-
quently addressed by government offi-
cials. Volkov suggested that the state’s
propaganda campaign had failed. “The
message should not have been that our
vaccine is so great but, rather, that this
virus is serious and dangerous.”
On December 10th, the sixth day of
Moscow’s vaccination rollout, I drove to
a municipal clinic just past the Ring Road.
Signs directed people coming for Sput-
nik V to a second-floor waiting area next
to a wall of windows that looked onto a
kindergarten. The clinic’s director, An-
drey Tyazhelnikov, had been vaccinated
in the fall. He told me that anyone who
was skeptical should join him on his
rounds. “It would be enough to show
them all the patients being brought by
ambulance, lying in the I.C.U., those
who are dying,” he said. “After that, I’m
sure confidence would grow.” In the two
hours that I spent at the clinic, about
twenty people came for their vaccina-
tions. One man said, “Someone has to
be first.” Another said that he was proud
Russia was “at the forefront in the bat-
tle against the pandemic.”
By mid-December, the mayor’s office
had expanded the list of people eligible
for inoculation to include factory work-
ers, transport employees, and journal-
ists, though it seemed that the city had
far more vaccine than it had people want-
ing to be vaccinated. A number of Rus-
sian journalists I knew got vaccinated,
then a fellow American correspondent
living in Moscow.
The more I thought about it, the
more I came to believe that, whatever
uncertainty lingered about Sputnik V,
remaining unvaccinated was the far
greater crapshoot. Last spring, barely
anyone I knew had been infected; I could
now count dozens of acquaintances who
had caught the virus. One spent a week
at a makeshift hospital in a pavilion on
Soviet-era exhibition grounds. Through-
out the fall and winter, Moscow had
been recording five or six thousand new
COVID-19 cases almost every day. I felt
like a character in an Agatha Christie
novel: with every page, my turn seemed
to be growing closer. Sputnik V was
waiting for me at my neighborhood
clinic. Who knew when I’d have access
to any of the alternatives?
And so one afternoon, just before
the New Year, I trudged through the
snow to a city-run clinic on a quiet side
street around the corner from Patriarch’s
Ponds, from which the Devil appears
in the opening pages of Mikhail Bul-
gakov’s “The Master and Margarita.”
The young man at the check-in desk
studied my documents, made a phone
call, and said that, yes, the clinic could
do it right away. After a quick consul-
tation with a doctor, I was called for my
shot. The jab was quick and almost pain-
less. “Congratulations,” the man at the
desk said when I came back out. He
handed me a stamped certificate.
That night, my arm was sore, but I
did not get a fever or chills. I felt more
relieved than nervous. Three weeks later,
I had my second injection, which also
passed uneventfully. In late January, I
took a test for COVID-19 antibodies; the
results, according to an interpretative
scale provided by the clinic, indicated
that my antibody levels were “probably
sufficient” to prevent illness. The odds
struck me as high that my own personal
pandemic was nearing its end. I thought
of something that Chumakov told me
before I went for my vaccine. Russia, he
said, had “demonstrated a certain will-
ingness to cut corners. But that’s no rea-
son to say that the vaccine itself won’t
prove effective. It has no less a chance
than any other—and, if indeed it turns
out to be a success, who will remember
or care about all that came before?”
