Putin prepares to get Covid vaccine — but the Kremlin refuses to say which one

LONDON — Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to receive a coronavirus shot on Tuesday, as intrigue surrounds the country’s vaccine strategy.

The Kremlin said it would not reveal the name of the vaccine that Putin will receive, only that it would be one of three Russian-made shots.

“We are deliberately not saying which shot the president will get, noting that all three Russian vaccines are absolutely reliable and effective,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, Reuters reported Tuesday.

There are three Russian vaccines — Sputnik V, EpiVacCorona and CoviVac — with the latter two only recently gaining emergency approval.

The Russian president is likely to get the vaccine Tuesday evening, Peskov added. It’s unclear whether he will be filmed receiving the shot as Peskov noted that Putin did not like the idea of being vaccinated on camera.

The vaccination comes as the spotlight falls on the country’s vaccine strategy. On Monday, Putin lauded multi-million dollar international sales of Russia’s Sputnik V Covid vaccine but the country’s own rollout appears sluggish, and contrasts sharply with the high numbers of vaccines destined for the international market.

There have been reports that Russia’s own production capacity is low and Putin appeared to nod to this on Monday. He said that Russia needed to ramp up vaccine production for domestic use and that supplying domestic needs was a priority, according to Reuters.

He noted that 4.3 million people in the country had already received two doses of the vaccine. This is substantially higher than, for example, the U.K. which has given around 2.3 million people both doses to date, but Russia was the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine (Sputnik V) back in August 2020 — the U.K. approved its first shot in early December.

Russia does have a number of logistical challenges to overcome when rolling out a vaccine. It is the largest country in the world and has a population of around 144 million people spread across a territory that spans Europe and northern Asia.

In early March, Putin noted that all but nine Russian regions had started to deploy the vaccine, with delays linked to “problems with logistics, distribution (and) locations,” the Moscow Times reported.

Global data on vaccination programs shows that Russia lags many other countries in its own domestic rollout, with the number of single doses administered in Russia hovering just above the number of those given in Bangladesh, according to Our World in Data.

The vaccination data is made more salient given that Russia has been hit so badly by the pandemic: It has recorded the fourth-highest number of cases in the world (over 4.4 million) and over 94,000 people have died from Covid in the country, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Another big issue hampering Russia’s rollout is vaccine hesitancy among its citizens. Daragh McDowell, head of Europe and principal Russia analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, told CNBC that the country’s lower vaccination numbers are, “probably much more a result of lack of willingness on the part of popular scepticism over the vaccine than a lack of supply.”

He noted that the latest data from the Levada center, an independent pollster in Russia, suggests that only 30% of Russians “are willing to get vaccinated, a number that’s actually gone down since last year.”

“This is mainly due to worries about side effects and that the vaccine hasn’t been tested enough – in other words, while the Kremlin got a propaganda boost from getting the vaccine out first, this was at the cost of doubts over its safety,” McDowell noted.

Sputnik V was initially only authorized in Russia for people 18-60 years old, meaning that Putin, who is 68, was too old to receive it. Further trials in senior citizens found that the vaccine was safe in people aged 60 and over, however, and that age group can now receive the shot.

“The fact that Putin has waited this long to be vaccinated himself will not have gone unnoticed and will have contributed to these doubts,” McDowell added.

“The president’s vaccination will convince some Russians of the vaccine’s efficacy and safety (but) high levels of social distrust and conspiratorial thinking will blunt it’s impact.”

He highlighted that the same polling data which showed 30% of Russians were willing to get vaccinated also revealed that almost two thirds believed Covid was artificially developed as a biological weapon.

Another aspect of Russia’s vaccine program that’s drawing attention is the high numbers of international sales of its vaccine. On Monday, Putin confirmed that Russia had signed international sales deals for Sputnik V doses for 700 million people.

RDIF, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund which backed Sputnik V’s development and deployment, said on Tuesday that Sputnik V had now been approved in 56 countries, with Vietnam the latest to join the list. Several countries in Eastern Europe, such as Hungary and Slovakia, have also ordered Sputnik V doses.

Meanwhile, Europe’s medicines regulator started a rolling review of Sputnik V earlier this month.

Verisk Maplecroft’s McDowell highlighted that although exports of 700 million doses was “an extremely ambitious number,” it likely includes does produced abroad, in India and South Korea for example, under license.

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine was approved by Russia’s health regulator in August last year before clinical trials were concluded, prompting skepticism among experts that it might not meet strict safety and efficacy standards. Some experts argued that the Kremlin was eager to claim victory in the race to develop a Covid vaccine, a charge it leveled at other countries. Russia has repeatedly said its vaccine is the target of anti-Russian sentiment.

Russia appeared to be vindicated in early February, when an interim analysis of phase 3 clinical trials of the shot, involving 20,000 participants, was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet. It found that the vaccine was 91.6% effective against symptomatic Covid-19 infection.

In an accompanying article in the Lancet, Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, England, noted that “the development of the Sputnik V vaccine has been criticized for unseemly haste. But the outcome reported here is clear and the scientific principle of vaccination is demonstrated, which means another vaccine can now join the fight to reduce the incidence of Covid-19.”