Facing trust deficit, Russian, Chinese vaccine could use a shot in the arm

 

For an indication of the trust deficit, look at the way the market responded to Russia's green light for its Sputnik V vaccine, or to news the flagship vaccine is more than 90% effective.

In a pandemic, trust is everything.
Beijing and Moscow saw early the potential benefits of pulling ahead in the race to produce an effective inoculation against Covid-19. Apart from the public health benefits and the keen awareness in both governments of the need to be self-reliant, a clear win would validate top-down models of government and innovation. It would also mean a much-needed image boost, at home and abroad.

In the end, both have had success. Moscow in August, to great fanfare, became the first to grant regulatory approval for a vaccine, one of its two leading candidates. By then, Beijing had already allowed doses of one of its own vaccines to be given to its military. About a fifth of all shots listed by the World Health Organization as undergoing clinical trials are Chinese. Yet without more transparency about research and testing — and a little less propaganda — neither country will earn the confidence needed to reap the full reward.

For an indication of the trust deficit, look at the way the market responded to Russia’s green light for its Sputnik V vaccine, or to news the flagship vaccine is more than 90% effective. They were yawns compared to the unbridled enthusiasm after Moderna Therapeutics published encouraging data in July, or indeed ongoing excitement as the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE goes through the U.S. regulatory approval process. Last month, positive results for that inoculation from a large-scale clinical trial were enough to push the S&P 500, MSCI World and the MSCI All-World indexes towards record highs, in no small part thanks to the robust evidence about the vaccine’s effectiveness.

China faced a higher trust hurdle from the start. It saw the first cases and there were questions from the earliest days of the outbreak over how swiftly it had shared information, perhaps missing opportunities to slow the spread. Even if it was not a repeat of 2002 and 2003, when Beijing took months to disclose the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, wariness lingered.