By WILL STEWART
- Professor Alexander Chucalin resigned from the health ministry’s ethics council
- It appears Chucalin sought and failed to block its registration on ‘safety’ grounds
- He accused two leading medics involved in the drug of flouting medical ethics
Russia‘s leading respiratory doctor has quit over ‘gross violations’ of medical ethics that rushed through Putin’s coronavirus ‘vaccine’.
Professor Alexander Chuchalin quit the Russian health ministry’s ethics council after making a fierce attack on the new Sputnik V drug ahead of the body approving its registration.
Amid deep scepticism among Western experts over the drug, it appears that Chuchalin sought and failed to block its registration on ‘safety’ grounds before quitting the ethics council.
He specifically accused the two leading medics involved in its development of flouting medical ethics in rushing the vaccine into production.
Dr Chuchalin named Prof Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Gamaleya Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, and Prof Sergey Borisevich, a medical colonel and Russian army’s top virologist.
The two men were the leading academics behind the new ‘world-beating’ vaccine.
Chuchalin allegedly asked them: ‘Have you passed all the necessary paths approved by Russian Federation legislation and the international scientific community? Not!
‘This job has not been done. Thus, one of the ethical principles of medicine has been grossly violated – to do no harm.’
He stressed: ‘I am depressed by the position of some of our scientists who make irresponsible statements about ready-made vaccines.’
Although specific reasons for his resignation were not given, in an interview with journal Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life) shortly before he quit, Chuchalin warned: ‘In the case of a drug or vaccine, we, as ethical reviewers, would like to understand, first of all, how safe it is for humans.
‘Safety always comes first. How to evaluate it? The vaccines that are being created today have never been used in humans, and we cannot predict how a person will tolerate it.
Professor Alexander Gintsburg, head of Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (left) and Sergey Borisevich, chief virologist of the Armed Forces (right). The two men were the leading academics behind the new ‘world-beating’ vaccine
Chucalin, who created the Russian Research Institute of Pulmonology, and is head of the Department of Hospital Therapy, at the Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, added: ‘It is impossible to determine this without weighing all the scientific facts.
‘Therefore, our number one task is to extract scientific data based on evidence-based medicine in order to understand that the action performed by scientists will not harm a person.’
Chuchalin said it is vital to know ‘the effect of the vaccine in the longer term’, adding that ‘the fact is that there are a number of biological substances that do not manifest themselves immediately, but only after a year or two.’
With Russia also preparing other vaccines to tackle Covid-19, he warned: ‘Those vaccines that are now being developed by many of our research centres, the criteria for their safety can only be of a short-term nature.
‘But the safety criteria for a vaccine must also be long-term and this becomes clear only with long-term observation – at least two years.’