It seemed to me that French medicine in the field of combating any infection in the form of bacteria and viruses has always been somewhere in the vanguard of scientific thought.
Some of the vaccinations that my children received while living in Europe were made in France.
All the more surprising to me is the slowness of the market leader of the pharmaceutical companies Sanofi and the Pasteur Institute.
But if the former are still trying to develop a formula that protects against COVID-19, the latter publicly refused research, citing inconclusive results.
The reaction of the human body to the substance turned out to be weaker than even those who had had the virus themselves.
For the French, such a public recognition of their own powerlessness and the surrender of positions in the scientific world is something out of the ordinary.
There must have been good reasons for that.
Some have suggested that the failure lies in the choice of a vector that delivers COVID-19 genetic material inside.
That is, it affects the body, but only once, the infection cannot multiply in the cells, so the method is quite safe and effective, it gives the body time to understand what kind of foreign muck it is and how to deal with it.
The same principle is used by Sputnik, but our scientists have relied on adenovirus (it belongs to the ARVI group and affects the mucous membrane of the upper respiratory tract), and the French - on chickenpox.
Someone was vaccinated from it, someone was ill himself.
This vector, of course, was modified so that the body would not recognize it, but the desired effect against COVID-19 was not achieved.
Although in the Zika vaccine, the same method has shown impressive results.
Pfizer and Moderna use messenger RNA - a technology neither Pasteur Institute nor Sanofi even had access to.
Everything is protected by patents, the intellectual market is busy, there were no leading French companies on it.
Sanofi had to team up with the American company Translate Bio to begin clinical trials of the future vaccine in March this year, after they failed with the vector version.
And the Pasteur Institute remained outside the vaccine revolution.
Scientists have yet to study the long-term consequences of the RNA method, and the hassle with storage and transportation is rife.
But now is not about that.
How did it happen that the French could not offer anything to the world, except for the production capacity for the vaccinations already invented by others?
It turns out that about the last two decades there has been a systematic reduction in funding for science and education.
France today spends half as much as Germany, from 2001 to 2018, spending was cut by 28% (in its neighbors they grew by 11%, in the UK - by 16%) No French university is now in the top 50 in healthcare and biology.
There are fewer and fewer French scientific articles.
And the average salary of an aspiring French scientist is 63% lower than in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (established in 1948 and unites 37 countries around the world).
Hence the not very attractive image for investors.
For comparison: if they are ready to invest about € 9 million in a French scientific company, then in a British one - € 12 million, and in a German one - all € 16 million. As a result, there is a brain drain from France.
Take Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier, for example.
In 2010, this Frenchwoman tried to get a job at the Pasteur Institute to revolutionize biology and medicine.
But they did not find a suitable place for her.
She went to Germany and last year received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a method for editing genomes.
Or another example.
RNA vaccine pioneer Steve Pascolo offered this technology to the Pasteur Institute back in 2002!
Then it was about the development of a vaccine against cancer.
They shook hands, filed a patent, but for some reason the university did not pay the fee.
It did not grow together.
Pascolo, the co-founder of CureVac, is currently based in Zurich and implements joint projects with BioNTech.
The French were again left with nothing.
There were other cases when, for example, in 2015, the same Pasteur Institute signed a cooperation agreement with the American company Moderna.
As a result, she made wide use of his power and expertise, but for some reason did not give anything in return.
The contract was eventually terminated.
Just think, Louis Pasteur founded his institute in 1887.
It was there that the very first course in microbiology was created, it was this scientific institution that has always been one of the world leaders in the study of infectious diseases.
It was there that they learned to fight diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio, flu, yellow fever and plague.
It was there that HIV was discovered.
But the most interesting thing is that Louis Pasteur was the scientific advisor of Nikolai Gamaleya.
In 1885, an international competition was held in Paris, in which our Nikolai Fedorovich won the ticket.
He came to study rabies.
A year later, with the assistance of Louis Pasteur, he created the first in Russia (and the second in the world) bacteriological station, where he began to vaccinate people against rabies.
This was not the end of their fruitful cooperation.
In 1887, Pasteur was strongly criticized in Europe, his treatment was questioned, he was reprimanded at the Paris Medical Academy, and then a special commission was even created in England to test his methods.
Nikolai Gamaleya came to the meeting of this commission, he fiercely defended Pasteur's methods and bacteriologists in general.
Then, for the next five years, he worked closely with him, gaining invaluable theoretical and practical experience, which he actively applied in Russia.
This is how closely our history is intertwined with France.
The Russian institute, named after the distinguished Nikolai Gamaleya, was the first in the world to invent a vaccine against COVID-19.
The Pasteur Institute is not in its best shape today.
But it would be great to come to their aid, to join forces.
But it is sad to understand that such a fruitful cooperation, as before, is hardly possible, although it must be between all scientists of the world for the common good (do not accuse me of being naive, dreaming is not prohibited).
The latest statements by French officials about the uselessness of Sputnik completely dispel all illusions.
Politics and the market have poisoned the scientific world.
It's good that we can count on ourselves.
Russia, unlike France itself, has sanitary independence, but in order to continue this way, it is necessary to protect both science and personnel.
The Pasteur Institute is an excellent example of this.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.