The head of the German Foreign Ministry, Heiko Maas, warns: Russia, they say, is using its vaccine - we are talking about "Sputnik V" - to conduct vaccine diplomacy.
It turns out (in fact not, of course) that the Russian authorities are putting forward political demands on the countries that receive our drug, making efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic.
Before I dispel this myth and talk about the reasons for this statement by Herr Maas, let's look at the situation with the approval of "Sputnik V" in the world. To date, our vaccine has been approved for use in over 70 countries. The total number of residents of these countries exceeds 3.4 billion. In terms of the number of approvals, we are in the top three drugs developed since the beginning of the pandemic.
In addition, more than ten countries recognize our certificates of vaccination with "Sputnik V" - also quite an obvious form of recognition of the quality of the drug.
And, no less important, the countries that are forced to wait for the decision of the supranational regulator - I'm talking about some EU countries now - either arranged a public demarche and asked for the supply of our vaccine, or declared that there was no way to wait for approval.
Even Germany, represented by Heiko Maas, made it clear that Sputnik V was needed and would be approved, but ... the Germans themselves turned on vaccine diplomacy.
They can be understood: one of the vaccines was developed by the American company Pfizer and the German company BioNTech.
The money invested in development must be repaid.
The inertia of Russia's accusations for any reason has not gone away and will not go away, and there is no evidence of any influence of the Russian authorities on the authorities of the countries that approved our drug, and will not be.
But who cares?
Not only that, Russia has supplied many free doses of drugs to different countries.
Vladimir Putin was one of the few leaders who spoke out in favor of abandoning patent protection for vaccines to boost their production, but both the Germans and the Americans were against it.
So it turns out that Herr Maas, from the task of quickly and effectively protecting the population of Germany and the EU as a whole, has moved on to lobbying for his drug.
Secretly solving the problem of containing our country.
How effectively he solved it can be understood by rereading above the number of countries that have approved "Sputnik V".
Throwing words to the wind is not developing a vaccine.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.