Corona Daily 126: Sputnik brings down a European Government

For an unknown reason, East European countries are hurting more in the pandemic than West European ones. Maybe like long covid, there is “long communism” that haunts those nations thirty years after communism was abandoned. In Slovakia, one out of 500 citizens has succumbed to Covid. Slovakia is losing every day 13 people out of a million, the third highest rate in the world.

Early this year, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Igor Matovic ordered 2 million doses of Sputnik V from Russia. He must have done it with good intentions. European Union has not approved Sputnik. Slovakia, after Hungary, was only the second EU country to order Sputnik. The Russian media lauded Russia’s humanitarian efforts to save Slovakians when western vaccines couldn’t. On 1 March, Matovic personally went to the airport to welcome the first batch of 200,000 Sputnik doses.

Slovakia’s government is a coalition of four parties. Prime Minister Matovic, for reasons best known to him, had arranged the vaccine deal with Russia in secret, without taking the coalition partners into confidence. In March, the political atmosphere in Slovakia was totally infected. Ministers started to resign one after another. Finally on 31 March, the Prime Minister resigned, and the Slovakian government collapsed.

If Matovic couldn’t survive without the support of the coalition partners, the reverse was also true. In the painful negotiations, it was finally agreed Matovic will become the finance minister and the deputy PM in the newly formed government.

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Meanwhile, SUKL, Slovakia’s medical regulator, issued a statement this week. They claimed Slovakia had received a different Sputnik. In February, the Lancet had published a paper giving Sputnik efficacy as 91%. Since the Lancet is a British medical journal, Russia hailed that paper as the final proof of Sputnik’s eminence.

Now, SKUL said the Sputnik sent to them is different from what is described in the Lancet. The properties are different: lyophilisate versus solution, single dose ampoules versus multi-dose vials, different storage conditions, composition and method of manufacture. SKUL has been repeatedly asking Russia for data, and 80% of the data requested has never been submitted.

One scientist at SKUL said the vaccines received by them were Sputnik V in name only.

(If you like Cadbury’s milk chocolate, no matter where you buy that chocolate, you expect it to taste the same.)

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RDIF (Russian Direct Investment Fund), Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, is responsible for exporting Sputnik. In a tweet, they called the SKUL statement “fake news”, and an act of sabotage. The vaccine was not tested in registered labs, thereby violating the contract. (Interesting, the fund doesn’t argue about the findings, but on the registration status of the laboratory).

SKUL replied that the laboratories were registered agencies, though not necessarily accredited with the EU. Anyway, the medical regulator was not aware of the contract between the two governments. Not having seen the contract, it was difficult to say whether it was violated or not.

Russia, through Putin’s spokesman and other channels, has now demanded the 200,000 doses are urgently returned to Russia. Slovakia was the 39th country to order Sputnik, and a real breakthrough for Russia, since it is an EU member. Who would have thought Slovakia’s medical regulator would want to check the vaccines they receive?

The compromise reached now is to send the samples to Hungary. The Hungarian laboratory has been asked to test them. Russia would still prefer to have the vaccine doses back.  

The drama is not over yet. If indeed the vials, ampoules, storage conditions, and composition vary from the original specifications, it would be difficult for the Hungarian lab to approve the Slovakian batch. If it confirms what the Slovakian lab claims, Sputnik V will be the first covid vaccine to have mutations.

Ravi