The news that the jab is as effective as the West’s best effor | .

The news that the jab is as effective as the West’s best efforts provides reason for cheer in regions like the Middle East and South America, where some countries have approved the vaccine — but it also could dog EU officials trying to hold together a coalition that has become embittered over the bloc’s contested vaccine strategy and sluggish vaccine rollout.

As countries like Hungary and Serbia — and maybe Germany — seek alliances with the Russian developer, EU citizens may want to know why leaders didn’t engage with Moscow from the start for the broader sake of public health.

The study in the Lancet, above all else, establishes the vaccine as a serious contender with an efficacy rate of about 92 percent. The figure was arrived at by comparing the number of people infected with coronavirus in the vaccinated group (14,964 subjects) with a control group given a placebo (4,902 subjects).

Measurement of coronavirus infections started when the second dose was administered, 21 days after the first dose. Researchers recorded 16 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the vaccine group versus 62 cases in the placebo group. Importantly, there were no cases of “moderate or severe” coronavirus infections in the vaccinated group.

Global roadshow
The results will embolden countries on the EU’s periphery, like Serbia and Belarus, that bet on the Russian vaccine. And it already has a taker within the EU: Hungary, which approved Sputnik V on January 22. (Budapest used an emergency authorization process allowing EU states to bypass rules that new biologically derived treatments should only be assessed centrally by the European Medicines Agency.)

POLITICO contacted every medicines agency in the EU and the European Economic Area. Among those who responded — Belgium, Slovakia, Croatia, Latvia, the Netherlands, Estonia, Ireland and Spain — none said they had had any contact with the Sputnik team. And none intend to.

“For the time being, there are no plans for directly obtaining Sputnik V vaccine,” said Ivana Šipić Gavrilović, spokesperson for the Croatian medicines agency HALMED.

Because the vaccine is derived from biotechnology processes, she said, a “centralized procedure is compulsory for its marketing authorization in the EU.”