A Capitalist Socialist vaccine

Undoubtedly, the hierarchy of the Covid vaccine ladder will be one of the most fiercely contested spaces the world has seen for some time; both between countries and within them. It won’t be surprising if Adar Poonawalla’s phone is ringing incessantly with calls from the who’s who for keeping that one vaccine reserved

Sanjay Nagral
Oct 30, 2020, Mumbai Mirror

Vaccine conversation is all around us. It better be. Our collective future is hinging on it. With little headway in treatment and with the pandemic raging on, it is the only substantive hope for a resolution of the Covid crisis.

The fortunes of some governments also rest on the vaccine. The promise of free vaccination for everyone has emerged as a new electoral slogan. Ominously, there is jockeying amongst countries to reserve the vaccine for their own people, described interestingly as ‘vaccine nationalism’. Undoubtedly, the hierarchy of the Covid vaccine ladder will be one of the most fiercely contested spaces the world has seen for some time; both between countries and within them. It won’t be surprising if Adar Poonawalla’s phone is ringing incessantly with calls from the who’s who for keeping that one vaccine reserved.

If one lists modern medicine’s major achievements, there is no doubt that vaccination will be very high on the list. It has led to the complete eradication of deadly diseases like smallpox across the globe and has contributed to increased life expectancy in many parts of the world. In India, the polio vaccine campaign is in our living memory. Most of us will have recollections of a few drops of the vaccine being thrust down our own or our wailing kids’ mouths. It has been one of our successful public health campaigns.

In 1952, Jonas Salk, an American virologist, produced the first inactivated poliovirus vaccine that had to be injected. Large field trials proved its efficacy and safety; it was licenced in 1955 in the US. This was, however, difficult to produce on a large scale. Simultaneously, Alfred Sabin, a paediatrician, was trying out a live virus vaccine which could be administered orally with longlasting immunity, thus increasing its acceptability. Sabin was unable to conduct large scale field trials and was not able to convince the government about its need.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Chumakov, a well-known virologist, was working on a polio vaccine. He had already discovered viruses responsible for the Omsk and Crimean hemorrhagic fever.

Chumakov had heard about Salk and Sabin’s work and requested permission to travel to the US. After Stalin’s death, the new Khrushchev government was more receptive to his request. He travelled to the US with KGB agents in his team. He and Sabin struck up a strong friendship.

Incidentally, Sabin had emigrated to the US from the erstwhile Soviet Union at the age of 15. Chumakov managed to get permission to conduct field trials of Sabin’s vaccine and invited him to Moscow.

Sabin was grilled by the FBI before his visit was cleared. In 1956, Sabin spent a month in Moscow giving lectures, meeting researchers and lobbying for vaccine trials. On his return, he wrote to the State Department for permission to ship his virus samples to the Soviets. Despite Department of Defence warnings, that the samples could be turned into biological weapons, the State Department approved. Chumakov put himself in charge of distributing Sabin’s vaccine to more than 15 million people in schools, hospitals, clinics, and nurseries. By the end of 1960, an additional 77 million children in the Soviet Union and another 23 million in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria received the vaccine.

The Soviet trials employed neither control groups nor placebos. In 1960, Chumakov wrote to Sabin that his vaccine was “winning new victories” in his country. Sabin was glad to hear the news, but was worried that the results would be rejected in the US.

For verification, the WHO dispatched its own expert, who penned a non-committal report stating that while the vaccine seemed to be working, definitive results would be a long way off. When the Soviets sent a group of scientists to share their findings at an International Conference in Washington, D.C., their work was dismissed by the Americans. Soviet deputy health minister Viktor Zhdanov famously pleaded, “I would like to assure you that we in the Soviet Union love our children and are as concerned for their well-being as much as people in the United States or any other part of the world are.”

It was a matter of time before the WHO recognised the value of this vaccine and incorporated it in global vaccination. It has now been used across the world with success and helped in controlling this scourge which had left thousands maimed.

2020 is different from the 1950s, when the world was neatly divided between the Americans and the Soviets. One cold war is over, but there are many wars now. With new forms of warfare. On the other hand, the world is more interconnected than ever before.

While politicians cynically use vaccine nationalism, scientists and public health experts have the legacy and the capacity to rise above it. As for all of us, we should hope that today’s Sabins, Chumakovs and many others from across the world are in touch with each other behind the scenes.