In dialogue with the state news agency Telam Dec. 27, Argentine President Alberto Fernández expressed his “eternal gratitude” to the Russian Federation for supplying Argentina with the Sputnik V vaccine, the first 300,000 doses of which arrived Dec. 2—with more to arrive in the course of 2021. Russia’s generosity is particularly important, he said, because other advanced-sector nations are buying up large quantities of vaccine and keeping it for themselves. Argentina, he said, is now one of only ten countries that have begun to vaccinate their populations “and that’s why what we’ve achieved is important.” He reported he had already been in touch with Bolivia’s President Luis Arce and Uruguay’s Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo, and would help those two countries and others in the region to obtain the vaccine.
Speaking also to Radio 10, Fernández pointed to attempts to discredit Sputnik V, cautioning listeners not to “get swept up in a war that at moments is geopolitical and at times commercial,” over the vaccine’s origin. He repeated that he will do everything possible to help “all those who ask us for help” to obtain the vaccine. The Argentine leader emphasized that the pharmaceutical companies that researched and produced the vaccines are top-notch and internationally respected, so no one need question their credentials.
But, he continued, it’s revealing that Pfizer’s vaccine isn’t called the “U.S. vaccine,” or AstraZeneca the “British vaccine,” yet media call the one produced by the private, Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute, “the Russian vaccine.” Despite all the names some wish to call it, he said, the Gamaleya Institute has accumulated a number of Nobel Prizes in its history, citing its 2015 success in developing two Ebola vaccines, using a platform of adenoviral vectors. (The institute was founded in 1891 by Nikolai Gamaleya, a student of Louis Pasteur’s.) ”Knowing all that, we want to guarantee [availability of] this vaccine for all our citizens,” he said. Fernández also reported on Argentina’s own breakthroughs in developing therapeutics and in the use of hyperimmune equine serum which has shown promising results in clinical trials in treating COVID-19 patients.
