VACCINE WARS
Sputnik V: EU Sacrifices Its Citizens by the Thousands on the Altar of
Anti-Russia Point-Scoring
European diplomats told Reuters that many countries would rather let tens of
thousands more citizens die than allow Russia to save them.
by Alan Macleod
March 19th, 2021
By Alan Macleod
BRUSSELS It is really not going well in Europe. Nearly 900,000 people have
died from COVID-19, a number of countries are facing new waves of the deadly
virus, and Paris is going into a four-week lockdown starting tonight after a
fresh spike in cases. Meanwhile, the European Unions vaccine rollout has
been particularly ponderous. The EU has managed to vaccinate only around
one-third as many citizens per capita as have the United States or United
Kingdom, even trailing far poorer neighbors such as Serbia or Turkey (who
have embraced Russian and Chinese offerings).
Killing our citizens to own the Ruskies
One potential solution to Europes woes could come in the form of the
Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine, endorsed by the scientific community as
safe and effective and already under production in Italy. Russia has
expressed its desire to work with European pharmaceutical giants to produce
doses to help the EUs 450 million citizens. Yet diplomats told Reuters that
many countries would rather let tens of thousands more citizens die than
allow Russia to save them. There are some who will not want to give
[Russia] this propaganda victory, and there are others who will be seeing
this as an opportunity to actually show that we are cooperating, one
diplomat said. Its Russian: its bad, is a dominant strain of thought
among policy makers, he added.
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Publicly, the EU has already dismissed Russias global COVID-19 vaccine
supply as a propaganda stunt. We should not let ourselves be misled by
China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they
organize highly limited but widely publicized operations to supply vaccines
to others, said President of the European Council Charles Michel, adding
Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes.
Behind the EUs back, however, a number of states are breaking ranks and
acting unilaterally. Hungary and Slovakia have already begun using Sputnik
and have moved ahead of others in the bloc in terms of vaccinations. Italy
has ordered shots, while the Czech Republic appears on the verge of doing
the same. Slovakias decision has sparked a serious split in its ruling
coalition. The neoliberal, pro-EU For the People Party has threatened to
resign from government over the matter.
Combating malign influence by spreading the pandemic
The United States has also spent much of the last year attempting to
suppress the development and global rollout of Sputnik V. A report from the
Department of Health and Human Services boasted that one of its primary
achievements of 2020 was working with a host of other government agencies to
combat the malign influence of Russia in the Americas. The primary example
it cites was persuading Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine.
Partially as a result of U.S. actions, the pandemic is raging out of control
in Brazil, the country hitting all-time highs of over 90,000 new infections
on Wednesday and nearly 3,000 reported deaths on Tuesday alone. ICU wards in
19 of the countrys 27 states are at capacity, with a new, more infectious
strain arising in the city of Manaus and found throughout the country.
Add that to Western hoarding of vaccines and the blocking of an intellectual
property waiver that would have allowed poor countries to produce the
vaccine for cost price, it seems clear that U.S. and EU actions have led to
the deaths of countless thousands of people in the Global South already.
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Western media have also kept up a near relentless barrage of negative
stories about the Russian and Chinese vaccines, constantly attempting to
undermine their credibility. It appears to have had a limited impact,
however, as a YouGov poll of 11 nations found that Russia is the most
trusted vaccine producer worldwide.
Sputnik V works along similar lines to Western offerings, with comparable
rates of effectiveness. Developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute, it is
a viral vector vaccine, meaning that it employs another virus to carry the
DNA encoding of the desired immune response into cells. Protein coding genes
from the coronavirus are inserted into two common cold-like viruses that
have been genetically modified so they cannot replicate inside the human
body. Like Western variants, it must be delivered in two doses some weeks
apart but the storage temperature (-18°C/-0.4°F) is considerably warmer than
that required for the Pfizer vaccine.
Cold War 2.0
The vaccine war is part of a wider international campaign currently aimed at
Russia. Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared Russian President Vladimir
Putin a killer and threatened entities cooperating with the new Nord
Stream 2 pipeline carrying Russian gas to central Europe with immediate
sanctions if they continue working on the project. He also rejected Putins
offer of a live, televised debate.
All of this is a far cry from 2012, when, as vice-president, Biden was
mocking Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romneys apparent obsession
with Russia. He acts like he thinks the Cold Wars still on, Biden joked,
I dont know where hes been. This is not 1956, he added; it exposes
how little the governor knows about foreign policy.
In 2012, only 2% of Americans saw Russia as their greatest geopolitical
threat. Today, that number is 26%, topped only by a massive spike in
anti-China sentiment. Unfortunately, Romneys rhetoric, risible in 2012,
seems tame by todays standards.