Chinese and Russian vaccines were initially dismissed in Western and other global media, partly because of a perception that they were inferior to the vaccines produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca. And that perception seemed to stem partly from the fact that China and Russia are authoritarian states.
But evidence has been accumulating for a while that the vaccines from those countries work well, too. The leading medical journal The Lancet published this week interim results from late-stage trials showing that Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine, had an efficacy rate of 91.6 percent. Those confirmed findings released in mid-December by the vaccine’s developers, the Gamaleya Center and the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
