Professor Alexander Chuchalin quit the Russian health ministry's ethics council after making a fierce attack on the new Sputnik V drug ahead of the body approving its registration. Amid deep scepticism among Western experts over the drug, it appears that Chuchalin sought and failed to block its registration on 'safety' grounds before quitting the ethics council.
He specifically accused the two leading medics involved in its development of flouting medical ethics in rushing the vaccine into production. Dr Chuchalin named Prof Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Gamaleya Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, and Prof Sergey Borisevich, a medical colonel and Russian army's top virologist.
Chuchalin warned: 'In the case of a drug or vaccine, we, as ethical reviewers, would like to understand, first of all, how safe it is for humans. Safety always comes first. How to evaluate it? The vaccines that are being created today have never been used in humans, and we cannot predict how a person will tolerate it.'
In a separate attack on the vaccine,
Prof Alexander Chepurnov said the 'danger exists' of 'increasing the disease with the wrong design of the vaccine'. Chepurnov is former head of the laboratory for specially hazardous diseases at Vector Institute in Siberia which is also involved in developing vaccines for coronavirus.
He warned: 'Time is needed….antibodies are different. In some situations - and for coronavirus, this is already known - the infection intensifies with some antibodies. It should be known which antibodies the vaccine produces.' But the vaccine creators had not published scientific articles on the vaccine, he said. They need to explain the level of neutralisation, and details of doses and 'whether it develops or not the ability to increase infection by antibodies'.
Another leading scientist
Vladimir Chekhonin, vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claimed Russia was flouting the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation and the country's own laws in human clinical research involved in Covid-19 vaccine testing.
He expressed concern about the use of serving military personnel as recipients of the vaccine. 'We cannot conduct experiments on humans,' said the respected immunologist. This is a gross violation of the international Nuremberg Code. We are just making fools of ourselves with this early vaccine that can bring us a lot of trouble.'