Just recently read a Russian article 'Operation E' on another Russian vaccine, EpiVacCorona, produced by our most prominent virology research institute, Vector (Вектор), famous for researching all infectious diseases, including Ebola and making a vaccine for it.
Since it's really long, here's the gist of it:
- Vector got their vaccine funded by government via direct involvement with Rospotrebnadzor (Russian FDA equivalent);
- Vaccine got an emergency approval even before it was out of 3rd phase of trials;
- Animal trials were promising, but in humans effective antibodies did not form at the same rate;
- Some volunteers who got the EpiVac, still got Corona, and others, who tried to find out if they had antibodies after the shot, had negative results;
- Vector issued volunteers their own test, which can find those antibodies, but no other test shows the same result;
- Volunteers then co-funded their own research, revealing that their plasma did not have a protection against Corona;
- The vaccine itself is a peptide type, it doesn't have the full S-spike coronavirus protein in it, rather, a certain proteins from S-spike were taken, put on a vector-type protein, in hopes that immunized will develop antibodies to parts of S-spike protein without exposing them to the S-spike itself;
- A Russian biologist, working in US, Olga Matveeva, founder of Sendai Viralytics (a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Merck & Co., Inc.), commented that antibodies produced by peptide vaccines are produced both for vector-protein and the peptides taken from the virus. Therefore, if not enough antibodies are formed to viral protein, other antibodies are essentially worthless for protection against coronavirus. Matveeva mentioned that it also matters what parts of S-protein were taken for a peptide-type vaccine: if they took any easily mutating parts, the resulting vaccine will not protect against variants;
- Vector worked on other types of vaccine, including mRNA like Pfizer and viral vector like Sputnik, but the peptide vaccine was considered 'most promising';
- Director of Vector was among the richest people in Russia, according to recent polls.
novayagazeta.ru
https://archive.ph/pDQoa -
interestingly, somebody archived this article a day ago, but had not used it on KF, as far as search says.
My thoughts on this: even though bribes and corruption, as well as saving face, are wide spread in Russia, somehow this does not seem a malicious attempt, rather, a technology that failed to do what people wanted it to.
Also makes me wondering, if it is somehow connected with Sputnik and Gamalea (or any other vaccine producer, including China) not wanting any competition. Who knows.