The Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine, developed by the , has been subject to scepticism since August 2020, when it became the first registered covid-19 vaccine in any country. In October 2021, UK newspaper The Sun for the Oxford/Astra Zeneca covid-19 vaccine and used it to create Sputnik V.
The claim was tiresomely familiar to . He is CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the financial backer of Sputnik V’s developers, and ever since Russian president Vladimir Putin surprised the world by announcing the approval of the vaccine, Dmitriev and his scientific colleagues have endured a barrage of criticism, hostility and disinformation.
“There is no basis for it whatsoever,” says Dmitriev about the theft allegation. He points out that the Gamaleya centre developed the technology seven years ago, published papers about it and used it to create experimental vaccines against Ebola and MERS. “We said it’s fake, because look, years ago there was publication. Nobody is talking about it now.”
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The Sun said its source was “security services” but didn’t go into detail. But Dmitriev doesn’t believe this. He sees it as part of an orchestrated campaign against Sputnik V waged by hostile anti-Russian forces and parroted by Western media.
“Initially, people said, oh, you registered Sputnik before phase III. Well, our point is that none of the vaccines finished phase III. All of the phase III will be finished in two, three years. Now we see only interim results.
“Second, they said, oh, you don’t have any publications. We and since then there are more than 20 publications of results. So that has been the answer.”
“And then they said, what about RCA?” He is referring to a row that erupted in April when the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) declined to authorise the import of Sputnik V on the grounds that the and hence could endanger recipients. Anvisa said it had found this red flag about replication-competent adenoviruses (RCAs) in data supplied by the Gamaleya centre, which the . In June, Anvisa authorised the vaccine.
The unproven allegations of theft therefore came as no surprise. “Every time, there is a new angle of attack to really put Sputnik in a bad way,” says Dmitriev. “And when we overcome it, there is a new one.”
Right now, he says, the stick being used to beat Sputnik V with is that it doesn’t have emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO), which would allow the vaccine to be distributed as part of the global initiative for sharing vaccines equitably, COVAX.
It is true that Sputnik isn’t among the WHO’s six approved vaccines but this doesn’t indicate a fundamental problem, says Dmitriev. Its approval has been delayed by manufacturing problems, not issues with the efficacy of the vaccine itself, says Annelies Wilder-Smith at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “We have very good dialogue with the WHO and we expect approval in the next couple of months. There are no major sticking points. It’s more of just going through the process that all of the vaccine manufacturers went through, just going through bureaucracy.”
The next issue could be a European Union decision not to use Sputnik V even if the European Medicines Agency approves it. Dmitriev says he hopes approval will happen in a couple of months. He believes the EU has already decided that it won’t use Sputnik V because there have been no discussions so far about purchasing the vaccine. But seeking approval in the EU is actually about gaining further endorsement of safety and effectiveness, he says.
On that score, Dmitriev has no concerns. “Efficacy is definitely there, and it really has an impeccable safety record.” The interim phase III results showed that the vaccine provides 91.6 per cent protection against symptomatic disease, the best result of any covid-19 vaccine so far.
This result is sound science, says at the University of Reading in the UK. The Lancet invited him and at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to comment on the phase III results and they concluded that, based on the published data, the vaccine is both safe and effective Neither has any involvement with Sputnik V.
Jones told 91av that he hasn’t seen anything since to change his mind. Western scepticism of Sputnik V isn’t scientific, he says, but is “related to general Russia-West relations, which have been frosty for some years now”.
“The disappointing aspect of Sputnik is that the Russian people haven’t taken to it,” says Jones. “It may be a suspicion that it’s not as good as they say it is.”
Dmitriev accepts that Russia’s vaccination rate is quite low – around 40.8 per cent are fully vaccinated, according to – but he says suspicion of Sputnik V isn’t the sole reason.
“There is significant vaccine hesitancy in Russia, it is true,” says Dimitriev, but adds that opinion polling shows that in Russia, Western vaccines are trusted 10 times less than Russian ones.
He also points to data showing that, despite its low vaccination rate, Russia currently has fewer new cases of covid-19 than the US and most of the EU. This, he says, is because Sputnik V is a superior vaccine in terms of duration of immunity and effectiveness against variants.
“We see lots of evidence, including from other manufacturers, that some of the vaccine efficacy is waning,” he says. A recent study in Sweden, for example, found that over five months, the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine against infection declined from 92 per cent to 47 per cent. In contrast, shows that protection at 5 months remains at 80 per cent.
“There is a scientific explanation: adenoviral vaccines stimulate more natural immune response, because they simulate disease more realistically than the approach of mRNA vaccines,” says Dimitriev.
Sputnik V also uses different viral vectors – the harmless virus that transports coronavirus spike proteins into the body – for shots one and two. “It was a very simple but very important scientific idea. We said if you use two different shots rather than the same shot twice, it works better. And since then, we and other people gathered evidence for this. When you combine vaccines, you have broader and stronger immune response. Sputnik was the pioneer in this mix-and-match approach. We don’t get enough credit for this.”
Sputnik V has also shown good efficacy against the delta variant of the coronavirus, he says. (91av spoke to Dmitriev before the omicron variant was designated, but on 29 November, RDIF and Gamaleya issued a saying that they believe Sputnik V will neutralise omicron.) It is also a good booster for use with other vaccines including mRNA ones, says Dmitriev.
For these reasons, Dmitriev believes that Sputnik V should be part of a collaborative global fight against SARS-CoV-2. “We believe the real power is to combine vaccines. We never say ‘just use Sputnik’, we say, of course use mRNA, of course use deactivated virus vaccines, because once you focus only on one technology, there is a risk to have surprises.”
“We don’t want to criticise any approach, but we call on all of the vaccine manufacturers to partner through combos and really think of lives and not just of maximising profits.”
The endless brickbats have become a “heartfelt” problem for the Sputnik team, admits Dmitriev, but he says they will rise above it. “We just keep in mind that we are not fighting for ourselves, we are fighting for people to get protected. And this is why we are not concerned. Our confidence is that results will overcome all.”
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