A story about Russia, Covid and vaccines … what could possibly go wrong?
I wonder if Putin knows my name now?
Mounting evidence suggests Sputnik COVID vaccine is safe and effective
Outlet: Nature
Length: 1639 words
Turnaround time: Was supposed to be one week but ended up being two weeks.
Number of interviews: Three, with another five that never responded to requests for interview.
Published: 6 July 2021
“If the government’s going to approve a vaccine before they even know the results of the trial, that does not build confidence.”
This news feature for Nature magazine examined the evidence for the safety and efficacy of the controversial Russian-made Sputnik Covid vaccine.
It was a fairly straightforward news write-up, but after it was published, things went … sideways.
Why this story?
Within months of a new viral pathogen emerging –SARS-CoV-2 – scientists had managed to develop not one but multiple effective, safe vaccines against it. There was a race to get Covid vaccines approved and out into the world.
Russia was the first. The Russian Ministry of Health approved the Sputnik Covid vaccine in August 2020, four months before the US FDA issued its emergency use authorisation for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
But the results of the early stage human trials of Sputnik hadn’t been published, and the phase 3 clinical trials – the final and most important large-scale trials in humans – hadn’t even started. So there was understandable concern that the Russian health authorities were putting politics before evidence, and not surprisingly the Russian people weren’t exactly falling over themselves in a rush to get vaccinated.
The magazine Nature – which publishes journalism as well as scientific research – wanted an explainer about the vaccine, how it worked, and what the evidence suggested about its safety and efficacy. Then-Asia-Pacific bureau chief John Pickrell asked me to do it.
Interviews
The first problem was that I had no scientific contacts in Russia, and it’s not exactly the most transparent of countries, even before Putin decided to invade Ukraine and bring the world to the brink of WW3.
My usual starting point for a story like this is to look up the lead authors of studies in high-impact scientific journals. John and the Nature team had helpfully provided a heap of links to studies and other stories about Sputnik, which gave me lots of leads to follow.
By this point the results of the phase 1/2 clinical trials of the Russian vaccine had been published, so I emailed the two lead authors and requested an interview.
Normally, this request would be a straightforward slam-dunk: a group of scientists with their paper published in a highly-respected journal (the Lancet) are usually falling over themselves to talk about it, especially to a journalist from an equally highly-respected publication as Nature.
But this time, there was no response. Weird, but this was Russia, which has a somewhat testy relationship with independent journalism both within and beyond its borders.
I could easily find someone in Australia to comment, but as Nature is an international publication, I needed people from other parts of the world. This was fairly early in the Covid vaccine story, so there wasn’t yet the global cornucopia of high-profile vaccine experts appearing daily in the media rounds for me to pick and choose from.
Fortunately, I was a member of an email group of Covid journalists, organised by the National Association of Science Writers in the US. I emailed the group asking if anyone could suggest experts both inside and outside Russia who might be knowledgeable and informed about the Russian-made vaccine. That delivered two names: one in Canada, and one in Russia.
This is just one of so many instances when being part of journalist networks like this one has been a huge bonus. Highly recommend seeking them out and joining them.
Research
This piece was all about the evidence, so that meant reading all the scientific papers relating to the Sputnik vaccine, its mode of action, its clinical trial results, and the broader scientific community’s commentary on all these.
Everyone was a bit twitchy about the Sputnik human trial data that had been published so far. At the time, the medical research world was reeling in the aftermath of the Surgisphere scandal, in which two pivotal Covid studies – published in two of the most prestigious medical journals in the world – were retracted after suspicions were raised that the data in them was fabricated.
So when the Russian authors of the Sputnik study declined scientists’ requests to share the entirety of their raw data, and argued they had provided enough in the paper for people to draw their conclusions, more than a few eyebrows were raised. Like, read the room?
Fortunately that wasn’t the only source of data. By this point, Sputnik had already been rolled out in several countries – the Sputnik vaccine even had its own Twitter account that regularly trumpeted the latest country to approve or use the vaccine – and these countries were doing their own studies on the ground as well.
Unfortunately, not all of them were published in English or in journals, so yet again I had those moments of wishing I was a polyglot. I used Google translate quite a bit.
At this stage, Sputnik was also going through the process of trying to get approval from key medical regulators including the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Association (EMA) and the World Health Organization.
This had become a political issue as well as a scientific one. These institutions were yet to issue emergency use authorisation for Sputnik, which meant it couldn’t be used in the US or EU, with cascading implications for other health regulators including Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Russia was accusing the EMA of playing politics, and the EMA was flagging concerns about manufacturing and data and Reasons. There was a lot of public finger-pointing, but these organisations are generally opaque when it comes to behind-the-scenes discussions, so the best I could do was report what was on the public record and leave people to draw their own conclusions.
Structure and writing
This was a fairly straightforward laying out of events, studies, and public statements by various organisations and people.
Because it was a relatively short feature, I did have to kill a few darlings; in particular, some great quotes from my interview with Russian scientist Dmitri Kulish. He was quite the character, and offered some hilarious insights into Russia and Russians which unfortunately didn’t make the final cut. Take for example, the following commentary about the challenges of post-vaccine surveillance for side-effects:
“Let me be honest here. We have limited data on it for a very simple reason. You know, in Russia, we have major, century-old problem that Russian people they usually prefer to survive on their own until the very last moment. This is true. That's why today we have this major drama with vaccination. Nobody wants to vaccinate. That's why we have problems with statistics because most Russian people will call doctor only when they cannot breathe anymore. If they still can breathe, they will not call a doctor. They will sit home and they will drink tea with lemon.”
I also fact-checked the story within an inch of its life. I’m normally pretty thorough with this anyway, and Nature is also incredibly rigorous with its fact-checking, but given the importance of the piece, I wanted to make sure it was rock-solid.
I’m pointing that out, because of what happened next.
Post-publication
The piece went live just before 9pm AEST on Tuesday 6 July.
On Wednesday morning, about 9am, Asia-Pacific bureau chief John – who was based in Sydney – passed on a message from the London HQ of Nature that traffic on the story was “going completely nuts.”
Wednesday evening, I get an alert from my personal website that my traffic is booming. I log in, and see that instead of the usual 20-30 visitors a day, I’ve had about 500. An hour later, it’s 1000, almost entirely from Russia.
At 7.20pm Wednesday, I get an email from a producer at RT – Russia’s state media – asking if I could do an interview with them about my Nature story.
I occasionally get media requests after a big piece comes out, so that wasn’t necessarily unusual. But something in my subconscious waved a little red flag that I needed to be careful with this one.
I emailed John and the UK Nature news editor to let them know about the interview request, and ask if there were any concerns. It was late evening in Australia and early morning in the UK, so I didn’t hear back from them straight away. But in the meantime, I didn’t want to leave the RT chap hanging, I said yes to the interview request, and waited for more details from him.
What I didn’t know at the time was that RT had just published this about my story:
At about 9.30pm, I got a Twitter message from a Russian journalist at Radio Free Europe – a US government-funded radio network that broadcasts into countries “where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established” (from their website).
He told me that Russian state media was using my article as proof that the international science community had accepted Sputnik as effective and safe. He then asked if my story was initiated or authorised by the journal's top level of editors? “It is important to know how much this news article shall be considered as an opinion of Nature journal as a brand?”
At this point, I started to get that deep gut ‘oh shit’ feeling. Nature is not a publication you want to misrepresent, or even represent at all as a mere freelancer, let alone on Russian-controlled state media talking about a controversial vaccine.
So I rang the UK Nature news editor directly, and gabbled my paranoia down the phone. She was great, and told me to sit tight while they worked out what to do.
By this point it was nearly 10pm, I was exhausted, but starting to get very twitchy about the stats on my website, which I assumed represented just a fraction of the views the actual Nature story was getting.
Don’t get me wrong – I love it when a piece goes gangbusters, because usually it means lots of people find it interesting. But in this case, there was a flash-point feeling to it; the charged political atmosphere of it being a story about Russia, Covid and vaccines meant it wouldn’t take much for things to suddenly tip towards trollish frenzy.
I was acutely aware, in a way I’ve never been before, that I have a Hungarian surname – with Jewish connections – and that might be something people would seize on and exploit or distort in some nefarious way.
I closed my computer, and as I was getting ready for bed, it suddenly occurred to me: I bet Putin has read my article.
With that cheery thought, I tried to get some sleep.
The next morning, I wake up to another email from another Russian media outlet requesting an interview. Shortly afterwards, my phone rings – a Russian number. I remember staring at it like it was going to bite me. No way am I answering that.
Thankfully, the Nature team in the UK are on it. They’re going to manage the media requests at their end, I can deflect all enquiries to them, and they’ll handle it. Big sigh of relief from me.
Then an email gets passed to me from Nature, from a reader requesting a correction. My story mentioned a clinical trial for the vaccine done in Brazil, but this person says the vaccine has never been approved in Brazil.
And here’s where I realise that even with the most rigorous fact-checking and multiple re-reads, the stupidest mistakes can still slip through. I had referenced a Sputnik study (albeit translated from Spanish using Google Translate) that was done in Buenos Aires, and for reasons known only to my stupid brain, I thought Buenos Aires was in Brazil.
Yeah … it’s the capital of Argentina. I’ve even been there.
Fuck. Fuckety fuck.
That was correction number one.
Then someone else emailed Nature, and pointed out that one of the figures we’d used from a vaccine study was from the per-protocol analysis (the analysis that only includes people who actually get all the recommended doses at the right time) instead of the intention-to-treat analysis (including everyone in the treatment arm of the study, regardless of whether they ended up getting the full treatment).
It’s a small thing, but it’s still an error and so that was correction number two.
Each time there’s a correction to a story, it has to be listed at the bottom of the story to show that it has been amended. It’s a moment of shame when that happens, because it’s public recognition that someone – usually the journalist – screwed up.
And, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, ‘to have one correction may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness.’
Lessons learned
I was so strung out in the aftermath of all this that I had a minor panic attack while shopping for groceries on the Thursday afternoon.
Scientific controversy and complexity I can deal with. But something about the fact that I had unwittingly become a pawn in a global political game that had very little to do with science really shook me to my bones. My Hungarian Jewish ancestry has also likely beefed up my DNA with some pretty strong epigenetic fear responses regarding anything to do with Russia.
It probably didn’t help that we were in the thick of the Covid pandemic, lockdowns, mass casualties, and even the simple action of shopping for groceries carried the risk of death.
Luckily, my fears about getting embroiled in a social media shit-storm didn’t materialise. There were the usual range of comments, from sensible to conspiracy theory, but no one came for me personally.
Would I have done anything differently? Probably not. I know even the most intensive checking can still miss big clangers. But I sure as hell know the capital of Argentina now.