DISINFO: WHO has double standards in relation to Covid-19 vaccines
SUMMARY
If compared how the WHO reacted to Sputnik V and to the other vaccines, it's noticeable that it doesn't apply the same criteria. Batches from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were found to be contaminated in the past, but WHO didn’t question the vaccines themselves. In the case of Sputnik V, in contrast, when it found problems in a fabrication plant in Ufa, it could have issued a warning to the vaccine producers or even a recommendation to interrupt the production of the serum in that specific factory. Instead, the body decided to paralyse the validation of Sputnik V as a whole.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about a global conspiracy to prevent the success of the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.
The claim that the WHO follows certain interests and has double standards regarding Covid-19 vaccines is not backed by any evidence. In fact, problems with inconsistent, problematic or missing data and lack of transparency have been regularly reported regarding the Sputnik V, leading some international health regulators to mistrust it or consider the information about it insufficient.
The comparison between Sputnik V and previous cases of contamination of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson batches is also deliberately misleading. As the World Health Organisation reported in June 2021 after visiting the Sputnik V manufacturing plant in Ufa, one of the main problems of the factory was the lack of proper traceability of batches, so in case of contamination, it would be impossible to determine which of them had been corrupted. This was a leading reason for the decision not to validate the Sputnik V as a whole, despite that the WHO had visited other plants and didn’t report the same problems. And this was not the case with Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, whose contaminated batches could be properly traced and withdrawn.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives about the Sputnik V vaccine in our database, such as claims that the process of recognising it is artificially delayed, that G20 countries recognised it as the best drug for coronavirus prevention, that the attitude of Western politicians towards it feeds vaccine hesitancy in Russia, that the West is waging a targeted campaign against this vaccine, or that there is a political-economical-viral alliance to prevent Sputnik V.