Argentina Takes A Shot With Russia’s Sputnik Vaccine

The vaccination center of the Hospital Garrahan in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

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Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

As nations around the world scramble to start vaccinating against COVID-19, many countries are finding it difficult if not impossible to get the vaccines they want.

Case in point — Argentina. President Alberto Fernández promised to start vaccination campaigns in the South American nation before the end of 2020.

They managed to hit that goal but just days before the New Year dawned — and not exactly as they’d hoped. Argentina tried to position itself to get early access to a vaccine. It hosted multiple vaccine trials for multiple pharmaceutical firms. It negotiated pre-purchase contracts with several pharmaceutical companies. It arranged to be the primary manufacturer of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in Latin America.

Yet as nations in Europe and North America started rolling out vaccines, the only doses Argentina could get their hands on were of the controversial Sputnik V from Russia. Russia’s Health Ministry, which is involved in developing Sputnik, authorized its use before it had even gone through clinical trials. Full public data on the ongoing trials still hasn’t been released. No major regulator in North America or Europe, including the World Health Organization, has signed off on Sputnik yet.

Nonetheless, local broadcasters breathlessly covered the Aerolíneas Argentinas flight that took off to pick up the first 300,000 doses of the vaccine purchased from Moscow. They declared it «the Flight of Hope.»

Argentina is now vaccinating tens of thousands of frontline health-care workers with Sputnik.

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Paola Osman, a second year resident at the Hospital San Martin in La Plata, Argentina, just got vaccinated with the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

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Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

Staff at the San Martin Hospital in La Plata, Argentina, were some of the tens of thousands of health-care workers vaccinated with the Russian vaccine.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

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Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

To understand Argentina’s rush to authorize the Sputnik V vaccine you have to look at how hard the pandemic has hit. The country had one of the most severe lockdowns on the continent, even using police to force people to stay at home. Yet the nation has ended up with a COVID death rate even worse than neighboring Brazil. The country of 45 million people has already lost more than 85,000 people to the disease.

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Maria Laura Niz, from the San Martin Hospital, in La Plata, Argentina, was nervous about getting vaccinated. But she’s more worried that without the vaccine the pandemic could get worse.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

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Ivan Martin Burnes is a nurse at the Lucio Melendez Hospital in Adrogué just south of Buenos Aires. He says debate about the effectiveness of the Sputnik V shot misses the point and that Argentina has to use the vaccine it’s got.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR.

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Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR.

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Andrea Mangano, the head of virology at the Garrahan Hospital says she’s very happy that her entire team was able to get vaccinated.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

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Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

Andrea Mangano, the head of virology at the Garrahan Hospital says she’s very happy that her entire team was able to get vaccinated.

Anita Pouchard Serra for NPR

Dr. Andrea Mangano, head of virology at the Children’s Hospital Garrahan, a public hospital in Buenos Aires, just finished getting all of her team vaccinated. She was the last worker on her unit to get the shot.

This has been an incredibly hard year for all of her staff both in terms of the workload and the emotional burden of caring for COVID patients, she says — and the arrival of Sputnik offers hope that things are changing.

«We are really very happy,» she says. «Now we can face this new year with a new perspective.»

• COVID-19
• vaccine
• coronavirus
• Sputnik
• Russia
• Argentina