DisinfoDigest Volume 1, August 2020
On August 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that this government had developed a COVID vaccine that would be fast tracked and that his government “was pushing ahead with large-scale manufacture and mass immunisation before so-called “phase 3” testing”.
The announcement was broadly criticized as many Western doctors, including Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at London’s Imperial College “The collateral damage from release of any vaccine that was less than safe and effective would exacerbate our current problems insurmountably. I hope these criteria have been followed. We are all in this together.” Dr. Zain Chagla of St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton told CBC News that scaling up this vaccine so quickly is very dangerous and could cause harm.
In July the Canadian Security Establishment issued a joint statement with UK and US intellegience agencies about a Russian government backed hack by APT29, also named “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear” was “directed at Canadian, United Kingdom and United States organizations, including vaccine research entities, involved in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts. These malicious cyber activities were very likely undertaken to steal information and intellectual property relating to the development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines, and serve to hinder response efforts at a time when healthcare experts and medical researchers need every available resource to help fight the pandemic.”
Sputnik V Disinformation Takes Off
The #russiavaccine hashtag was largely driven by a tweet with a video that claimed to depict Vladimir Putin’s daughter trying the Sputnik V vaccine. The video was watched by nearly 1/4 million people. The video itself came from a related RT story. The woman in the video is not the daughter of the Russian President.
Respect 🙏
Putin's daughter was among the volunteers for trials.#RussianVaccine #Russie pic.twitter.com/tQGjcIFcwp
— Zoya 🚨 (@Zoya_nafidi) August 11, 2020
Russian government narratives that aimed to counter Western expert criticism emerged, stating that “Western criticism of world’s first coronavirus vaccine prompted by fear of competition & loss of face”.
Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn stated, of the Russian vaccine, that “It can be dangerous to start vaccinating millions… of people too early because it could pretty much kill the acceptance of vaccination if it goes wrong.” He continued, “Based on everything we know… this has not been sufficiently tested…It’s not about being first somehow – it’s about having a safe vaccine.”
A virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, John Moore told the New York Times that “this is all beyond stupid, Putin doesn’t have a vaccine, he’s just making a political statement.”
According to publicly available data on the ClinicalTrials.gov website, only 38 people participated in the Russian vaccine trials.
Conspiracy theory websites that claim that “Big Pharma” is behind the Coronavirus outbreak have so far not commented on the Russian vaccine claim.
The West is Following Moscow’s Lead to Skip Trials
The head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been heavily involved in Russia’s “Sputnik V” vaccine program, Kirill Dmitriev stated on August 31 2020, that the United States and UK are now “exactly following the example of Russia” in ignoring large scale trials for COVID-19 vaccines.
However, the vaccine that is being considered for fasttracking by the US and UK, AstraZeneca’s AZD1222, is undergoing “late-stage Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials for its vaccine”.
In comparison to the 38 people that were tested in the Russian vaccine trials, 1,077 people participated in the AstraZeneca AZD1222 Phase II trial which concluded earlier this summer. In the Phase III trial, the vaccine candidate will be tested on 30,000 individuals. According to Reuters, the vaccine could be rolled out by year-end with data from late-stage studies expected later this month.
The Russian government statement is intended to lend credibility to its claim of having developed a working vaccine. A claim that as mentioned earlier, has been widely criticized by western medical experts.
