Russia too adopted a tried-and-tested technology. Rather than starting from scratch and using newfangled mRNA technology, it modified a vaccine type that had been successful against Ebola. This was a route similar to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, but Russia’s Gamaleya’s Sputnik V used different adenovirus vectors for the first and second shots, which apparently raised the overall effectiveness to 91.4 percent, well above its Western counterpart. In August, while still in Phase II trials, it became the first vaccine to be licensed anywhere in the world.
