THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 23
perts in Russia and in the West, few
doubted the fundamental construction
or even the likely efficacy of Sputnik V;
their concerns were about politics and
the process. “I don’t see any reason to
denigrate the quality of the work of the
scientists,” Twigg, the global-pub-
lic-health expert, said. “But, given the
system in which those scientists oper-
ate and how that system has behaved,
it’s not surprising or unwarranted that
people reacted with suspicion.”
By late August, Sputnik V’s Phase III
trial had begun, with the aim of vacci-
nating thirty thousand volunteers; an-
other ten thousand would get a placebo.
One morning this past fall, I went to one
of the trial sites, City Polyclinic No. 2,
on Moscow’s southern outskirts. During
the first wave of the pandemic, the clinic
had housed a round-the-clock CT cen-
ter to scan the lungs of infected patients.
Several doctors and nurses contracted
the virus, but all survived. I was met by
Natalia Shindryaeva, the clinic’s direc-
tor. “We’re living through history and,
what’s more, taking part in it,” she said.
We stepped into the exam room where
the vaccine was being administered. A
nurse opened up a giant freezer. There
they were: hundreds of glass vials of Sput-
nik V, with a blue cap for the first in-
jection and a red one for the second, to
be administered twenty-one days later.
A trial participant walked in and rolled
up his sleeve. I asked him why he’d de-
cided to take part. “I’m tired, and ready
for this to be over,” he answered, tug-
ging at his surgical mask. I could em-
pathize; in fact, I felt a pang of jealousy.
O
n November 9th, Pfizer announced
that its interim Phase III data had
shown its vaccine to be more than ninety
per cent effective. Two days later, the
Gamaleya Institute issued a press re-
lease saying that Sputnik V was ninety-
two per cent effective. Then, on No-
vember 16th, Moderna said that its
vaccine was almost ninety-five per cent
effective. Another week passed, and the
Gamaleya Institute updated its interim
figures: actually, Sputnik V was ninety-
five per cent effective, too. As Vasily
Vlasov, a prominent epidemiologist and
a professor at Moscow’s Higher School
of Economics, told me in December, “It
looks like we couldn’t allow for this ver-
sion of Sputnik not to reach outer space.”
Logunov seemed offended and con-
fused when I suggested that political
pressures might have affected the timing
of the results’ publication. “What you’re
suggesting sounds like a bad joke,” he
said. “It could never happen.” He ex-
plained that, similar to Pfizer and Mod-
erna, Gamaleya had published its results
in accordance with the trial’s protocol,
which called for such findings to be re-
leased once a certain number of partic-
ipants had contracted COVID-19. And
few people were questioning the actual
data: Sputnik V appeared to protect
against illness as well as its competitors
did. (The Gamaleya scientists also sub-
mitted the results to a scientific journal
for review; the journal has yet to pub-
lish them.) Gushchin, from Gamaleya’s
genetic laboratory, said of the suspicions,
“It’s very sad to see. As if we’re all a
bunch of crazy Russian scientists who
poured something into vials and said,
‘Now go inject yourselves.’”
In mid-December, on the basis of
data collected from some twenty-three
thousand participants in its Phase III
trial, Gamaleya issued its final determi-
nation of the vaccine’s efficacy: 91.4 per
cent. “I don’t expect everyone to imme-
diately love me and believe in my prod-
uct,” Logunov said. “There’s no need to
trust me. Just look at the numbers—the
serological results of those vaccinated,
the antibody titers they produce, their
rates of infection.” Nearly five hundred
participants in the Phase III trial shared
information online as part of what they
called a “people’s research” project, meant
as an independent check on Gamaleya’s
figures. No one reported any major side
effects. Seventy-five per cent of people
said that they had developed antibod-
ies, as confirmed by private lab tests—a
figure in line with the Gamaleya proto-
col for the trial.
The real success of Sputnik V may lie
in its popularity with foreign markets,
especially those that were shut out of the
early global vaccine bonanza. A Septem-
ber report from Oxfam revealed that na-
tions representing thirteen per cent of
the world’s population have purchased
fifty-one per cent of all anticipated vac-
cine supplies. The U.K. and E.U. mem-
ber states have secured orders for enough
doses to vaccinate their entire popula-
tions nearly three times over. Covax, a
program led by the W.H.O. to insure an
equitable global vaccine supply, has said
that it will likely be able to inoculate only
twenty per cent of the populations of de-
veloping countries this year; as yet, none
of those doses have been distributed.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think
it matters which vaccine was registered
first,” Twigg told me. “But being able to
fill a need that other countries can’t, or
won’t, is what is going to be most con-
vincing.” This year, Dmitriev expects five
hundred million doses of Sputnik V to
be produced by licensed partners abroad,
in what the R.D.I.F. calls “technology
transfer” deals. These could be particu-
larly appealing to low- and middle-
income countries; it may be cheaper for
them to make vaccines than to compete
on the international market. For those
buying directly from Russia, Sputnik V
costs less than twenty dollars for a sin-
gle course of two doses—that’s more
than Oxford-AstraZeneca’s vaccine, but
less than the vaccines by Pfizer and Mod-
erna, which run between thirty and forty
dollars per course. Another selling point
is logistical. Sputnik V, like Oxford-
AstraZeneca’s product, can be stored and
transported in a standard medical refrig-
erator. The mRNA vaccines require much
colder temperatures: five degrees Fahr-
enheit or below for Moderna’s and minus
seventy-six degrees or below for Pfizer’s.
To date, more than fifty countries, in-
cluding Algeria and Mexico, have pre-
ordered Sputnik V, and half a dozen plan
to produce the vaccine themselves. A
Phase III trial is under way in India,
where a leading producer of generic med-
icines has already agreed to make more
than a hundred million doses per year.
In late December, after Argentina’s ne-
gotiations to acquire the Pfizer vaccine
stalled, an Aerolíneas Argentinas jet de-
parted from Moscow loaded with three
hundred thousand doses of Sputnik V,
the first of twenty-five million that Ar-
gentina has agreed to buy. In January,
officials in Kyrgyzstan, concerned about
