On April 23, RBC.ru published that: “Russian Direct Investment Fund compared mortality after vaccination with Sputnik V and other vaccines.” The publication says that the death rate per 1 million people after vaccination with a Russian vaccine is significantly lower than with foreign vaccines. So, for Sputnik, this indicator stands at 2, and the leader of the list, Pfizer, has as many as 39 points. According to this information, the specialists of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) studied the publicly available data of 13 medical regulators, and then collected everything into a single “rating” table, which reflected the number of deaths per 1 million vaccinated people.
So, statistics have supposedly shown that Sputnik V is the least “lethal vaccine”. But can we believe these statistics? Interestingly, the authors of the study themselves admit that at the moment they cannot establish a more or less obvious link between vaccination and deaths, which means that all this evidence can be a game with statistics and nothing more. In addition, the links in the Twitter account of Sputnik V are published as a screenshot, which means that they are not clickable, so it is quite difficult to type these links to check the data.
However, we typed all the links and many of them were not working, and those links that were active did not provide the necessary data.
USA: During the check, it was found out that the site of the CDC VAERS (USA) does not provide data on mortality, but only general information about COVID-19.
France: On the website of The French Agency for the Safety of Health Products, however, we could find accessible and understandable information.
Germany: The link given in the tweet did not lead to a page with specific data, but when we went to the site, we found information about vaccination.
United Kingdom: UK Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency provides the data on vaccines efficacy against COVID-19, but no information on the number of deaths after vaccination could be found.
Norway: The Norwegian Medicines Agency provides reports on the number of deaths after vaccination, but with a caveat: “the fact that a person dies soon after being vaccinated does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship”.
Russia: There is the link to the official website of the Ministry of Health. There is no information about the vaccine, but there is detailed information on the spread of the coronavirus infection. The Sputnik V vaccine has its own website, there are links to studies, but there are no statistics on mortality after the use of the vaccine.
With that being said, we cannot compare data that was collected using completely different methods as well as comparing several different statistics just to prove that some vaccines ‘cause more lethal cases than others’. We also should keep in mind that vaccine creators are competing with each other for the global medical market part and they are interested in creating effective vaccines, which will get a good reputation within the medical society and among common people.
Currently, only seven vaccines are available worldwide. The top three manufacturers promising to end the pandemic, which has already claimed more than 1.3 million lives worldwide, are Pfizer-BioNTech, Sputnik V and Moderna. Vaccines developed by Pfizer-Biontech (USA-Germany) and Moderna (USA) dominate in Europe, North America and the Gulf states. The Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine has already been registered in 57 countries, including Belarus, Hungary, Iran, Mexico and other countries.
However, in our opinion, there are problems of informational nature: on the official websites of Pfizer-Biontech, Moderna and Sputnik V there are no exact figures on the mortality of the vaccine. But, for example, international experts, the authors of the article “Data discrepancies and substandard reporting of interim data of Sputnik V phase 3 trial”, published in the authoritative medical journal The Lancet doubt the effectiveness of Sputnik V, which supposedly provides 91.6% protection against COVID-19.
The New York Times published the article “Russian Campaign Promotes Homegrown Vaccine and Undercuts Rivals” with reference to State Department officials and researchers from the Alliance for Securing Democracy group claiming that the “state” Russian media are conducting an information campaign against American and European coronavirus vaccines.
French journalist Luc de Barochez said in the publication of the French edition of Le Point (“L’Europe a perdu la guerre des vaccines”) that in the “battle” for the supply of vaccines to the world market, each country is responsible for itself, with which we cannot agree. The creation of such production facilities in the future will allow each of the countries that have successfully created vaccines to receive “geopolitical dividends”.
In our analysis, we would like to highlight one feature. The main controversial issue is that there is no firm confidence in any vaccine. Each country-manufacturer strongly promotes its product, gives it the maximum possible statistics on the level of safety against coronavirus infection.
RESEARCH | ARTICLE © Elena Kaveshnikova, Alina Gabdrahmanova, Irina Rjendinskaya, Evgeniy Zagoskin, Mariya Serchuk, Bizuale Desta, Al Furaidjy Ahmed Adil Saddam, SUSU, Russia
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