No doubt we all appreciate the way scientists around the world are rushing to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Unfortunately, most seem motivated by commercial profit than scientific discovery. This provoked me to write “The Great Covid-19 Vaccine Scam,” on July 23.
But there are a few reputable scientists who have not struck Faustian bargains with big pharmaceutical companies. And they caution that there’s simply no way to complete proper trials and secure approval for a vaccine before early 2021.
This is why it should concern us that leaders like American President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are exerting power and influence to pervert that rush from scientific research into political sport. Hell, listening to some leaders talk about their progress, you get the impression the race for a Covid-19 vaccine is a substitute for the postponed Summer Olympic Games.
First, Trump made a show of announcing that he would have a vaccine very soon, adding – as if to make clear his political motivation – that he would have one by Election Day on November 3. But the prosecutorial Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s VP running mate, admonished Americans to ignore Trump’s grandiose promises. She advised that they should press him instead to answer this one question satisfactorily:
When am I actually going to get vaccinated?
Then, like a master shyster showing his apprentice how it’s done, Putin one-upped him with the following announcement:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said a locally developed vaccine for Covid-19 has been given regulatory approval after less than two months of testing on humans. …
Calling it a world first, President Putin said the vaccine, developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute, offered “sustainable immunity” against the coronavirus. He said he knew the vaccine was ‘quite effective’, without giving further details, and stressed that it had passed ‘all needed checks’.
(BBC, August 11, 2020)
Frankly, this is as fanciful as Putin announcing that Russia has suddenly developed a magic pill that enables women to deliver healthy babies after only 3 months instead of 9. Then again, this is the same Putin who lords over a doping enterprise so endemic that the IOC banned most Russian athletes from the 2016 and 2018 Olympic Games. It also banned them from the postponed 2020 as well as the scheduled 2022 Olympic Games.
Alas, Putin achieved the jingoistic glory he craved when he engineered the performances of Russian athletes at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. I commented on his last laugh in “Putin Turns $51 Billion Sochi Olympic Park into Racetrack?!” October 15, 2014.
More to the point, though, he couldn’t care less about the side effects of doping on Russian athletes. He cared only about Russia’s total medal count placing it either on top or in competition with Olympic superpowers like the United States and China.
In a similar vein, he couldn’t care less about the side effects of his “Sputnik V” vaccine on anyone stupid enough to take it. He cares only about the pyrrhic thrill of declaring Russia the first nation to develop one to treat Covid-19 – efficacy and safety be damned. For this reason alone the WHO should emulate the IOC by banning Russian scientists …
Meanwhile, in a ruse to boost public confidence, Putin shared that one of his own daughters had gotten vaccinated. Except that this is from the same Three-Card Monte playbook that had Trump sharing that he had taken hydroxychloroquine. In other words, if you believe either one, you’re the sucker P.T. Barnum had in mind when he famously quipped that there’s one born every minute.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Because, despite Putin’s best efforts to cower and compromise every one of them, there is still at least one ethical scientist in Russia. And that scientist, who is arguably Russia’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, not only upstaged but also undermined Putin’s announcement by quitting in protest:
Russia’s leading respiratory doctor has quit over ‘gross violations’ of medical ethics that rushed through Putin’s coronavirus ‘vaccine’.
Professor Alexander Chuchalin quit the Russian health ministry’s ethics council after making a fierce attack on the new Sputnik V drug ahead of the body approving its registration. …
He stressed: ‘I am depressed by the position of some of our scientists who make irresponsible statements about ready-made vaccines.’
(Daily Mail, August 13, 2020)
In fact, Chuchalin is skeptical even of scientists conducting more responsible trials, namely those who say they can have safe and effective vaccines early next year. This, because he’s convinced that all “phase 3” trials must last at least two years to even begin to determine the side effects.
Unfortunately, part of the aforementioned Faustian bargain is that scientists have sold their ethics to allow
- pharmaceutical companies to profit from marketing vaccines like hot cakes ASAP; and
- political leaders to claim victory in the great vaccine race and damn the consequences, come what may.
But, as far as Putin is concerned, Russia has already won the Covid-19 Vaccine Games. In fact, reports indicate that he is now focused on his next international competition: cyber wargames to meddle in this year’s US elections, in which he hopes to get Trump re-elected president of the United States.
Related commentaries:
vaccine scam… Putin doping enterprise… Sochi… Covid-19 thread…