Thread by @WheatNOil

Oof. Not good news for the Sputnik vaccine.

Dr. Rasmussen (now a fellow Saskatoonster) explains things in her thread. So give it a read.

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1387397186372005893

Good question.

No, this has nothing to do with the AstraZeneca or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and everything to do with Sputnik specifically.

https://twitter.com/pjstpaic/status/1387438043179585536

This is what I wrote about the AstraZeneca vaccine and linked in there is a fantastic video by @ScientistSwanda to explain it.

Sputnik is a similar ‘type’ of vaccine but there’s some differences.

https://twitter.com/WheatNOil/status/1344475418351468546

Remember, AZ and J&J both basically put the code for the spike protein (read: asshole protein) on an empty shell of an adenovirus.

This adenovirus is a useless husk. They’ve taken away its ability to do much. Most importantly they’ve taken away its ability to replicate & spread.

So it can infect your cell, but then it can’t replicate or spread or do anything. All it does is get your cell produce asshole protein (like the mRNA vaccines do).

Your body sees these proteins, destroys them & the useless adenovirus, & now remembers the asshole protein.

Okay, so that’s all well and good. Sputnik does a similar thing but they use two ‘different’ adenoviruses between the two doses.

Otherwise, the viruses do the same thing. Be a useless vehicle to get your body to produce asshole protein.

Except it appears that in the adenovirus for the 2nd shot, they didn’t remove the part that makes it useless.

See, as Dr Rasmussen describes, there’s a part of the virus that you can delete so the virus can’t replicate. And they didn’t do that for the 2nd Sputnik shot!

So now they’ve given a live replicating virus instead of useless one.

Now, adenoviruses don’t generally cause serious symptoms, but that’s not the point. That’s just straight up sloppy! Did they forget? Is it a production concern? What the hell?

That’s basically the limit of my knowledge here and so I defer to real experts on the matter for more info.

But some important points:
1) This is a problem with Sputnik, not a problem with this ‘class’ of vaccine. It has no bearing on AZ or J&J.

2) This is why it’s useful to have different federal agencies vet this stuff. There are processes in place to make sure quality standards are met. And when they aren’t, we catch them, like in this case.

I guess, for the record, Sputnik disagrees, calls it ‘fake news’, and says the decision is ‘political’ in the link provided. Now, it’s possible this was a problem with only that batch of vaccines but... this sort of response doesn’t build confidence, to put it mildly.