Russia isn’t having a Sputnik moment.The announcement Tuesday by Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country was the first to approve a coronavirus vaccine did not provoke the awe and wonder of the Soviet Union’s launch of the first satellite into orbit in 1957.
Instead, it was met by doubts about the science and safety.But the claim underscored how, like the space race, the competition to have the first vaccine is about international rivalries as well as science.
The first nation to develop a way to defeat the novel coronavirus will achieve a kind of moonshot victory and the global status that goes along with it.