Covid-19 vaccines: A stamp of approval from a journal isn’t a substitute for regulator scrutiny

A superficial reading of the history of vaccination might lead you to believe that it is simple. Dried smallpox pustules had been used for 1,000 years to inoculate people against smallpox before the first successful vaccine trial, conducted by Edward Jenner in 1796 on a single eight-year-old boy.

A more detailed reading, however, reveals two significant risks both extremely relevant in the current pandemic.

The first is that bad vaccines do not just fail to protect, they can cause direct harm to patients. Some make subsequent infection with the disease they are intended to protect against more serious.

The second risk is that trust in vaccines is easily damaged and slow to recover. People feel anxious about interventions given to the well – the first anti-vaccination movement appeared just a few years after Jenner’s successful trial.

The Russian government appeared to be taking both these risks when in August 2020, President Vladimir Putin, announced the registration of a new Covid-19 vaccine: Sputnik V.

Sputnik V

While Putin said that it had gone through “all the necessary trials”, the registration certificate said that it had been trialled on just 38 participants. The international responses ranged from concern to outrage and, since that announcement, everything about Sputnik has seemed worthy of detailed scrutiny, as…

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