US organic chemistry expert: Sputnik V is competing dishonestly

In a piece titled "Russian Vaccine Behavior", Lowe accuses the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) of "deliberately promulgating lies" about competing manufacturers of vaccines against coronavirus, and calls for "taking down this crude propaganda" Otherwise, the American writes, "Twitter and other platforms should take it down for them", apparently hinting at the blocking of the official pages of "Sputnik V" in social networks.

The information on AAAS site states: "Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He’s worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases".

It's also mentioned the following: "Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer".

Here is the article of Derek Lowe:

"In the last post, I mentioned the Twitter response to the Brazilian rejection of the Gamaleya vaccine. I believe that the official blue-check-marked “Sputnik V” Twitter account is run by the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the sovereign-wealth part of the Russian state that is in charge of rolling out the vaccine to different countries. In that case, the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund needs to clean up its act.

I say that because of their aggressive political marketing. Here’s a tweet from earlier today, all about how countries that are “independent enough” to not only use “Western” vaccines but also the Russian and Chinese ones are doing better in the pandemic. But beyond this, they have also posted tweets about the safety record of their vaccine and others in Hungary, specifically claiming that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has “32x the death rate” and “6x the infection rate” of their own vaccine. That follows up on a tweet claiming that data across several international health sources shows that there is a higher death rate after administration of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as well.

These claims are bullshit. Posting them is a disgrace.

Here’s an analysis by Carl Bergstrom that goes into the details. To summarize, the first column for the international data is summarizing raw death numbers, not adjusted for population. The population-weighted numbers given are total deaths, not vaccine-associated ones: so yes, if someone gets vaccinated and then falls off a cliff, it’s going to be included. No accounting is made for how long any of the vaccines have been administered for. That also means that the differences in who gets the different vaccines in different countries are going to overwhelm the numbers as well. That applies to the Hungarian data as well: it appears that the Pfizer vaccine and others have gone into disproportionately older patients as compared to the Russian one, and that cohort of course has higher all-causes mortality as a background. No less an figure in the mRNA vaccine world than Katalin Karikó noticed this problem and others with the data (that link should take you to a Google Translate page, since I’m assuming that most readers here speak about as much Hungarian as I do). Update: here’s a translation from a native speaker.

What we’re seeing here is a deliberate attempt by the backers of the Sputnik-V vaccine to smear the competition, Pfizer especially. It’s not enough if they succeed – others must fail. This is a vile, destructive tactic that will do nothing but harm, and anyone who actually gave a damn about global health would have nothing to do with it. Promoting your own vaccine on its merits is fine, but spreading fear and doubt about the others like this is disgusting. The Russian Direct Investment Fund is deliberately promulgating lies. They should take down this crude propaganda, and if they don’t, Twitter and other platforms should take it down for them.

Postscript: I fully expect to see the defenders of the current Russian government’s honor – what there is of it – to jump into the comments here and on my Twitter feed. This happens most times anything mildly uncomplimentary about Russian issues appears here, and this post is a lot more uncomplimentary than usual. Come at me. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Russian people, who over the years have managed to make great contributions to humanity while cynically being abused by their leaders, who have too often been a series of despots and thieves".

Here are some of the comments on Derek Lowe's article:

Peter Quinn: This sort of thing makes it very difficult to take the official data on Sputnik at face value. It is clearly a political exercise, which is going to impact trial results in the responsible country. Not being allowed to publish if it’s not great is the least of it if they are being that politically aggressive as policy. And this baseless conspiracy theory posting is very much policy if it is coming from an official Russia account.

Emba: The twitter account is clear evidence that Russian agencies are engaged in dirty business. There is also plenty of clear evidence that US Pharma companies also engage in dirty business involving multi-billion dollar fine and well known corruption. The relationship between the dirty business and how well the product actually works isn’t always clear.

Dinnty: This is kind of sad. They need to get some of their more experienced propagandists in there working on this. I’m sure they have someone who could do a really slick job.

Jonathan B: Just a question: have Gamaleya submitted proper clinical trial data to any of the regulators who have a high reputation for proper scrutiny before approval? I genuinely don’t know, Sputnik V data doesn’t seem to have been reviewed by the FDA, EMA, MHRA, but may have been by others.

Pablo E Garibotti: The Sputink was approved for EAU by Argentina’s ANMAT More than 5 million dosis have been applied since without any major issue (thats is more than half the total covid-19 vaccine dosis applied in my country) The Health Ministry of the Buenos Aires City mentioned yesterday that the data is showing around 90% reduction of infection among vaccinated people (he is from a center-right party so no pro-Russian political bias) In Argentina we have applied around 8 million dosis (Sputnik 5m, Sinopharm 2m and AZ 1m) Disclaimer: I received the Sputnik’s first dosis last Friday (65 yo, no side effects)