Do you believe it? Would you take it?
Putin holds semi-false elections, so his polling numbers need to look good. Then came COVID-19. He has that dictator’s complex about how the disease isn’t serious, etc. You would think a country with a poor human rights record would be better at controlling the disease, but nope.
That tanked his popularity, not that I’ve seen any post-COVID-19 Russian polls. To win the next election, he has to solve the problem. So he “did”.
It might not be totally fake. It might be an injection of serum antibodies or something. I seriously doubt this is a functioning vaccine. If it was, Putin would be selling it to other countrires, while taunting them that Russia is better, so that’s why they won the race to the vaccine. Any other country would see right through it.
I would take it if it got FDA approval. I may consider it if a Western European country gave it the go-ahead. I wouldn’t take it on Russia’s say-so.
It is most certainly not going to be serum antibodies. That would basically be impossible to mass produce atm. I’m betting it’s something extremely safe as a starting point. Maybe it’s just a couple of the common corona viruses.
I suspect it’s a vaccine, but it seems impossible it has been thoroughly tested. That make work out for them. Let’s say a vaccine has a 75% chance of being effective and a 25% chance of making symptoms significantly worse in a number of cases. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would consider mass distribution at those odds . . . But it would probably work out. It’s a terrible gamble.
I wish them luck but I think it’s too risky. What mystifies me about the whole vaccine deal is the worry about espionage and the race to be first. It’s a world crisis, why don’t the countries share their research and data openly? What does it matter who does it first? Whoever wins the race should share openly with everybody else.
I would not rush to get the first vaccine released, if (as seems very likely) it has not gotten adequate phase 3 testing.
You don’t “win” the race to a vaccine if has a lousy protection and/or safety profile.
I kind of like the idea of top-level privileged Russians being the guinea pigs on this one.
No way I would inject myself with anything from Russia.
I suspect it’s just another Phase 2 vaccine being trialed on the general population. And that they plan on showing unsubstantiated numbers showing it works in time to for the US presidential election. After the election and the real numbers prove false it (or wow, it actually is effective) will not matter to Putin, he will have gotten his propaganda boost for Trump.
So why hasn’t Trump endorsed it since he loves everything Russian? Is he waiting for another private phone call with Putin to get his talking points straight? Is he secretly making a deal with Russia to provide vaccine for his supporters.
The reports said Putin’s daughter had received the vaccine, I wonder if that’s true.
Russia figuratively gave us Trump and look how that is turning out.
Australia had vaccines available in the laboratory in 2 weeks from the COVID DNA description being available. I see absolutely no reason to doubt that the Russians have ‘a vaccine’. And it’s taken long enough that they’ve had time to do some mouse testing, and some testing on soldiers, and some production build up.
From when I was hearing about it, the Russian medical system isn’t exactly the same as the American medical system, and ‘approved for use in Russia’ isn’t the same as ‘approved for use in the USA’.
The problem with low trust, strongman-led countries like Russia is that everyone knows what the leader wants, and the pressure to conform to those desires and hide or ignore data that doesn 't support what the leader wants becomes extreme.
So even if all the scientists are acting in reasonably good faith, if they all know their careers hang in the balance if they don’t get the ‘right’ result, they are going to approach their investigations with a lot of bias, unwitting or not. That’s not how good science happens, but it’s how ‘state’ science happens. You get Lysenkoism and other bullshit wrapped in science, and many scientists actually come to believe it, as the power to rationalize what you already know you need to believe can be overwhelming.
So no, I wouldn’t touch that vaccine until I’ve seen trials in a country where everyone doesn’t have a vested interest in the ‘correct’ result, rather than the scientific result.
From what I’ve read, there’s no reason to believe the approach they are evidently taking is either a poor or a dangerous one. Just that it’s certainly not fully proven yet. But seems that others are probably working on the same exact same thing they are, if on a different timeline.
It probably contains disinfectant, and sunshine.
I would consider it if they were following the established FDA guidelines, which it sounds like they have not. Let’s see what happens with Russia’s coronovirus infection rate as this rolls out.
It seems likely that there is a promising possibility that is skipping widespread testing to land a propaganda coup. I’d be reluctant to take it if that is true.
I wouldn’t put Russia in the Stalinist category right now. Just that (and I am out of touch even with this), even after State Science ceased to be a thing, the handling of risk and value was different, the aim of medical education was different, the practice of medicine was different.
On a related note, a Russian national I was house sharing with made an observation about the foreigness of the Australian welfare system: “In my country, if you don’t work in the summer, you die in the winter”.
Some nice analysis here by Derek Lowe.
Overall there is no reason to think it is fake or poor science. The people responsible are probably not fools and quite capable. But then their work gets politicised. Their vaccine is probably no better or worse than any of the other candidates being developed. But it has become hostage to politics. Any leader of any nation could make similar claims about their vaccine progress. Any some may well yet do so.
I’ve found the discussion and analysis around the Russian vaccine profoundly disappointing and parochial.
Here is the plain math and logic around vaccine development in the times of COVID:
- Every single day, somewhere between 5000 - 10,000 people are dying of COVID, along with some other number of people who are suffering long term side effects and the like. Thus, if you can shorten the timeline of a fully deployed, 100% effective vaccine by a single day, you save roughly that many lives & human suffering.
- The risk of COVID differs by several orders of magnitude between the most susceptible and least susceptible populations and we’ve already gathered data that can predict the likely harm to someone from being infected based on demographic factors like age and comorbidities.
- Vaccines have two failure modes, they either fail to provide immunity or they cause side effects.
- For both failure modes, the larger in magnitude the failure, the less statistical power in studies is needed to detect and quantify it (ie: you need much less people and much less time to figure out if your vaccine is 50% or 60% effective vs 99.6% or 99.8% effective or if it causes side effects in 10% of people vs side effects in 0.01% of people).
Based on the above 4 points, if you had a purely utilitarian goal to minimize the sum total of human suffering over time, you would come up with some mathematical formula for each person that took into account the likelihood of someone being infected with COVID * the probabilistic estimate of suffering and tally that up against the likely immunity benefit conferred from the vaccine - the probabilistic estimate of suffering from side effects, modulated by your best estimate of the opportunity cost of waiting for for a better vaccine to be developed.
Or to put it another way, if you have someone who has a 30% chance of dying if infected with COVID (typical of the elderly) and a 1% chance per month of getting infected, you should give them a vaccine that kills 1% of the people who take it unless you think you can come up with a vaccine that kills less than 0.7% of people within the next month.
Bad, fast vaccines should be rolled out to the highest risk groups ASAP while lower risk groups have the luxury of waiting for a more rigorously tested vaccine.
Now, there are many reasons why such a framework is inappropriate in a Western Liberal Democracy, for example:
- With the high levels of vaccine skepticism, even a relatively safe vaccine could do more harm than good as people would focus on the few deaths the vaccine caused and not the many lives the vaccine saved and this would decrease vaccine adherence.
- Western society tends to adopt a copenhagen interpretation of ethics where we blame people who try and fix a problem but hold blameless the people who stand to the side and watch a problem not be fixed.
- Our historical deep aversion to forced human experimentation due to the legacy of Nazi science.
- A leadership that is optimized towards getting reelected, not minimizing human suffering.
Other societies operate under different parameters which gives them different possibility spaces under which to explore and, as should be evident by now, there should be respect for that as those different parameters allowed many of them to weather the COVID crisis very differently from “The West”.
There’s no reason to suggest, for example, that Russia hasn’t been doing secret human challenge trials on political prisoners which has allowed them to assess the safety and efficacy of the vaccine far faster than Western countries and the data they’ve gathered so far has given them enough confidence to start rolling it out while they wait for additional data to suggest whether it should be spread wider.
There’s no reason to suggest they couldn’t suppress news of adverse reactions to an extent such that there’s no real loss of confidence over the vaccine and that Russian society wouldn’t collectively shrug at the few side effects that do occur because at least it lets them end the pandemic.
It’s important to note that this is not what I’m suggesting Russia actually is doing or that I have any evidence for or against this. My point is that the sum total of Russian criticism has amount to essentially “Well, that’s not how we would do it in the West and the West obviously knows best so they must be stupid” without acknowledging how different parameters alter the calculus of the possible.
The West called the Chinese lockdown measures “draconian” and then had to impose the very same lockdowns on their own societies. They called mask wearing superstition not backed by science and then had to backpedal and struggle to adopt masks in their own society. They called South Korea’s text message alert system an invasion of privacy when it was welcomed by South Korean society. Western prejudice has damaged the Coronavirus response over and over and over again so you’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical of so many in the West calling Russia’s vaccine response reckless.
Russia’s response may be reckless, it may not be, but if you’re going to evaluate it, evaluate it from first principles rather than falling back on a presumed Western supremacy which manifestly does not exist when it comes to dealing with infectious disease.