Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Russian Surprise and Post-Corona Conflicts, Op-ed


Sat 15 Aug 2020 | 07:06 PM
H-Tayea

By: Dr. Salem Al Ketbi

The battle to invent the world's first vaccine against the Corona virus appears to be interesting to observers and specialists in international relations, as it is the other face of the polar conflict between the major powers, and as one of the arenas for competition that draw the conflict directions and the limits of power, status and hegemony in the post-Corona world.

My own conviction is that it is not possible to understand the escalating debate between China, Russia and the West - and even within the West itself - about the effectiveness of the expected vaccine without an understanding of the mechanisms of international conflict.

The polar race to invent the vaccine began quickly last March, when the German government accused US President Donald Trump of attempting to “rob” a vaccine project against the emerging corona virus, which was being developed by a German laboratory. The German laboratory categorically denied this news on Twitter, while the White House remained silent.

According to the German newspaper Die Welt, US President Donald Trump tried to acquire a new vaccine that is being developed by the German company Eurofac specialized in making pharmaceuticals, as President Trump wanted to obtain the vaccine exclusively for distribution only in the United States.

However, he ran into a German government refusal to the point that the German Economy Minister Peter Altamaier protested on that on the state radio, RDD, and said that Germany “is not for sale.” The newspaper, which obtained information from “government departments”, said that the US president is seeking either to attract scientists to the United States with “high financial offers” or to ensure exclusive production of the anti-virus vaccine.

The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that the German government would not allow seeing the vaccine slip out of its hands for the benefit of another foreign country after it had financially contributed to its production. It is also a matter of national sovereignty, it said, as the German Economy Minister said: “When it comes to infrastructure, national and European interests, we will be ready to act according to necessity.”

This indicates that the matter is not only related to scientific research and material profits, but is closely related to the position of competing countries and their struggle over hegemony and sovereignty through scientific research.

The German-American race about the vaccine has barely calmed down, and news followed about the start of experiments on American and Chinese vaccines, some of which have promising results, as the World Health Organization stated at the end of last July that there are 26 candidate vaccines in the world that are being evaluated during clinical trials on humans, and that most of these experiments are still in the “first stage”, which mainly aims to assess the safety of the product, or the “second stage” for measuring effectiveness, while only five of them are in the more advanced “third stage”, when the effectiveness is tested on thousands of volunteers.

These measures are taken on vaccines  developed by British, Chinese, German and American companies, until several Western countries issued doubts about the effectiveness of a Russian vaccine announced by President Vladimir Putin, as the German Ministry of Health took the initiative to question the “quality, effectiveness and safety” of the Russian vaccine.

The important thing here is that many questions were raised by the announcement of the Russian vaccine, especially that there are twenty countries that have requested to obtain it, while a list of countries expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the vaccine and the experiments that were conducted on it. Scientists in Germany, France, Spain and the United States urged to show caution, and the Russian minister of health, Mikhail Murashko, said, “It seems that our foreign colleagues are feeling certain competitive advantages from the Russian vaccine and are seeking to express opinions that are totally unfounded.”

Russia has officially confirmed that these concerns are absolutely baseless, and the Russian minister said, “The first batch of the vaccine will be ready to be delivered to medical doctors in the first place within the next two weeks,” while President Vladimir Putin announced that the vaccine had passed all the required examination procedures, and that his daughter had already obtained it. Yet, the World Health Organization said that it was in talks with the Russian authorities about conducting a review of the vaccine that was called “Sputnik V”, as the Russian vaccine does not seem to be on the organization's list made of six vaccines that have reached the third stage of medical trials, which includes broader tests on humans.

The German view in particular was expressed by the German Minister of Health, Jens Spahn, who said, “It may be dangerous to start immunizing millions of people too early because it may greatly stop the acceptance (effectiveness) of vaccination if something goes wrong.” And he added, “It is not so much about being the first as it is about getting a safe vaccine.”

Isabel Imbert, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Marseille, said the promise of getting a cure very early could be “extremely dangerous”. In the United States, Anthony Fauci, the country's chief virus expert, said he was skeptical of the Russian allegations.

Despite the scientific debate about the importance of the Russian vaccine passing the third stage of experiments, which includes thousands of people, as the most important part of the testing process, the race for the vaccine is not far from the polar conflict, as Russia assimilates the search for a vaccine to the space race in which the Soviet Union and the United States competed during the Cold War, which was reflected in President Putin's strong involvement in the announcement of the vaccine, describing the matter as evidence of Russia's scientific superiority, not to mention that the name “Sputnik” indicates a desire to link the Russian achievement to the name of the first Russian satellite that was launched during the Cold War space race.

Regardless of the effectiveness of the Russian vaccine, the extrapolation of the evidence of the Russian-Western debate about this step confirms that it is also related to a struggle over a scientific scoop parallel in importance to the victory of “Sputnik” in October 1957, when the former Soviet Union sent its first satellite to roam the Earth's orbit, realizing the first victory in the space race at the American amazement at the Russian surprise. Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, said, “We are facing a Sputnik moment for many people who did not expect Russia to be the first in developing the vaccine.”

The question now is: has the moment of Russian scientific victory neared even though the world was waiting for a Western-Chinese competition? Has Russia succeeded in reversing the equation of the new polar conflict to put itself at the forefront of the contenders to lead the post-Corona world?