DISINFO: EU’s decision not to purchase the Sputnik V is questionable, other vaccines may be dangerous
SUMMARY
The EU’s decision not to purchase Russian vaccine Sputnik V is unacceptable and impossible to understand, since it belongs to a well studied type of vaccines while others are of a new, and maybe dangerous, genetic type. Some experts can’t understand why the European Commission is not including the Russian vaccine developed with traditional technology in its plan of future purchases […] while the data of the full study published in The Lancet shows that it is safe and efficient.
RESPONSE
The messages in the articles are a part of a disinformation campaign aiming to promote the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and discredit Western vaccines, launched after approval of the Sputnik V vaccine was met with scepticism and criticism, even by Russian specialists in the country.
There are serious doubts about the safety and the efficiency of the Sputnik V vaccine, given the lack of transparency of the Russian authorities about it. Contrary to the claim, the article published in The Lancet by the developers of the vaccine wasn’t a full study, but partial data on the phases 1 and 2 of testing, and its results were immediately contested by a group of prominent scientists and doctors who raised their concern about what they called the “very strange patterns in the data” such as the “duplicate values for different [groups of] patients”. Those scientists called for the publication of the original and full data, which Russia has not done.
See other examples of these disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that Western attacks on the Russian coronavirus vaccine are a corporate Cold War against humanity; that a report on the Covid-19 situation in Russia aims to discredit the Sputnik V vaccine or that the UK launched a smear campaign against it; that British propaganda tries to dilute the failure of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the Sputnik V; that the US and the EU face multiple deaths out of fear of admitting Russia’s success against coronavirus; that the WHO confirmed that the Sputnik V was on Phase 3 of clinical testing already in August 2020; that the WHO and Microsoft sabotaged the Russian vaccine; that Europe is turning to Russia due to its desperate need for a vaccine; or that the West criticises the Sputnik V because it can’t accept Russia’s primacy and because its pharmaceutical companies will lose billions of dollars.