Science & technology | Sputnik V vaccination

Are the Russian covid-vaccine results accurate?

A new study calls into question a published clinical trial

FILE -- Lyudmila Soboleva, a doctor, is inoculated with Russia's Sputnik V vaccine for COVID-19, in Moscow, Dec. 7, 2020. The credibility of Russia's vaccine, named after the world's first satellite, the Soviet-era Sputnik, has been dented by the fact that President Vladimir Putin announced it was ready for use before normal clinical trials had been completed.Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)Credit: New York Times / Redux / eyevineFor further information please contact eyevinetel: +44 (0) 20 8709 8709e-mail: info@eyevine.comwww.eyevine.com

Jun 22nd 2022

If you flip a coin, your chances of getting heads or tails are equal. But if several people flip a dozen times each, the chance of them all getting a 50:50 split is small. Neither are they likely all to get exactly the same split, 50:50 or otherwise, between heads and tails. This simple concept is what Kyle Sheldrick of the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, and his colleagues have used to show that clinical trial results for Russia’s Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine, published in the Lancet in 2021, contain some numbers which are extremely unlikely to occur in that type of trial.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Irregular regularity”