Why Merkel and Putin are cooperating on the Sputnik vaccine

Churchill, FDR and Stalin could cooperate against Hitler, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that even amidst talk of a new Cold War, sanctions and more than a little sanctimony, people in the West are willing to make deals with Moscow in the name of fighting the new global threat, Covid-19.

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine may have been rushed through its certification at home and been the subject of some overblown nationalist hype (not that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been entirely free of the latter), but so far it appears to be a serious and effective jab, with a potential 91.4 per cent efficacy. Although based on a different source of modified adenovirus, a common cold virus, it is similar in many ways to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, not least in that it is relatively cheap and can be stored in a regular fridge.

There is still widespread suspicion about the vaccine in Russia, where over a million have received the first of their two jabs, but several other countries have leapt at the chance to use or license Sputnik V, including Algeria, Brazil, China, and India.