Who snored in Italy with Putin on Sputnik and beyond
Not just Sputnik. Here is who has moved the strings of the operation 'From Russia with love', what is really behind it and the fears of intelligence
Back all (now) on Russia.
Covid had rekindled relations between Italy and Russia. With the pandemic, Moscow was in a great hurry to arrive first in everything, even in our country. The aid of the mission 'From Russia with love' and the close collaboration between the Gamaleya Institute and the Lazzaro Spallanzani Research Institute in Rome on the Sputnik V vaccine now risk being a boomerang.
Italy, in fact, rather than having earned it, has paid for what should have been a 'gift' and offered sensitive information on a silver platter that worry intelligence and diplomacy.
SPALLANZANI AND GAMALEYA IN ARM
On March 20, 2021 , a first agreement was announced with Spallanzani in Rome to test the Russian anti Covid vaccine, Sputnik V. The president of the Lazio Region, Nicola Zingaretti (Pd), made it known that it was "a scientific experiment in awaiting formal authorization from EMA [European Medicines Agency, ed ] as regards the study on variants ".
In the end, Sputnik V was never authorized by the EMA. However, last January Spallanzani announced the collaboration with the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow to carry out a comparative study on the effectiveness of Sputnik V against the Omicron variant. The first results – published on medRxiv by the Italian-Russian team, led by Professor Francesco Vaia, director of Spallanzani and Alexander Gintsburg, director of Gamaleya – are presented as better than the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
THE RUSSIAN SOVEREIGN FUND
"The Coronavirus Sputnik vaccine demonstrates titers of virus neutralizing antibodies to the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) more than 2 times higher than 2 doses of Pfizer vaccine (2.1 times higher in total and 2.6 times higher 3 months after vaccination) ”, declared the Russian sovereign fund Rdif , investor of Sputnik V and responsible for marketing.
THE DOUBTS OF SCIENTISTS
All claims disputed by numerous scientists , who believe that an article published in The Lancet to celebrate Sputnik V contains inconsistencies and errors. So much so that to date neither the Food and Drug Admistration (Fda) nor the EMA have authorized it because the information disclosed does not fully convince.
END OF COLLABORATION AND DOUBTS
On February 25, 2022, the day following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Lazio Region stopped all forms of collaboration with Gamaleya, a body subsidized – and therefore controlled – by the Moscow government. The project with Spallanzani, according to Repubblica , was financed "entirely by Italy".
But as the newspaper Domani recalls, in the article on medRxiv “we read that the research was financed by the Russian sovereign fund Rdif, which holds the rights to the vaccine. Instead, the director of Spallanzani Francesco Vaia, co-author of the study, escaped from the word that the study was entirely financed by Spallanzani himself, or rather from Italy. Because?".
The article states that in this matter "many things do not add up" and gives the example of Vaia, who before becoming director of Spallanzani "had published only four minor scientific articles, the most important of which is entitled Efficacy of anti – suck in the prevention of bacterial contamination of the water lines of dental units. In practice, a study on how to prevent the bacteria present in our mouth from being sucked into the dentist's drill and then contaminating the rinsing ".
WHO PULLS STRAIGHT?
Meanwhile, on March 16, despite the ongoing war, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the inspections to be held in Russia in March for the evaluation of Sputnik V "have been postponed to a later date. "Which" will be fixed as soon as possible ".
THE WARNING TO ITALY
The close collaboration between Italy and Russia on Sputnik now threatens our country. Alexei Vladimorovic, former Russian consul in Milan and director of the European department of the foreign ministry, says Corriere della Sera , has issued a warning: if Italy joins the new sanctions plan against Moscow, there will be "irreversible consequences".
THE FEARS OF INTELLIGENCE
At stake, we read in the article, there would be not only medical records with the health data of patients, commercial agreements for drugs and equipment, "but above all an iron pact for the realization of the Sputnik". In fact, Spallanzani exchanged numerous sensitive data relating to Covid with Gamaleya.
Now, explains the Corriere , “the fear of diplomacy and intelligence is that retaliation will take place by revealing what really happened starting from March 2020, after the arrival of a delegation of Russians in our country. The official version spoke of aid to deal with the pandemic emergency. In reality, the 007 mission had quite other purposes ".
5 STAR RUSSIA
The agreement between Italy and Russia, called 'From Russia with love', was made by the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The level of relations between Italy and Russia at that moment is at the peak. In the previous July – writes the Corriere – Putin was received with all honors at Villa Madama for a dinner that brought together entrepreneurs and politicians, with 5 Stars and Lega as the masters ”.
The ministries of Health, Foreign Affairs and Defense remained on the sidelines of the very high-level agreement between Conte and Putin, however, now Minister Lorenzo Guerini has ended up in the crosshairs who, instead, together with his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu limited himself to implement what was decided by the two leaders.
THE "HEALTHCARE" MISSION
The Russian mission in Italy that began on March 22, 2020 seems, however, to have little to do with the health emergency. La Stampa , in fact, had revealed that "the 'aid' would arrive with a Russian military shipment […] with a security clearance (customs control only on goods)" and that "inside the planes there would be 22 military trucks and 120 doctors Russian military, specialists in biological warfare […] the head of the mission was Sergey Kikot, already at war in Syria for Russia ”.
Many of the doctors, we read in the article, were part of the GRU, the military secret services of Moscow, and several sources on the record spoke of an intelligence operation.
La Stampa at the time of the mission stated "that the amount of aid was limited", useless for 80%, with tools such as ventilators that came under investigation because they were dangerous. What was passed off by the Russians as a gift to Italy was actually supported economically by our country which not only paid for the flight and fuel costs of the aircraft, but also for the accommodation of all the envoys from March 22 to May 7, 2020. " Something that – reports the Turin daily – was around (by default) between 700 thousand euros and one million ".
Furthermore, all the people of the mission had free access to laboratories, hospitals and data so that a few months later the New Yorker revealed that the DNA of a Russian citizen who had fallen ill in Italy on March 15 had been used to process Sputnik.
THE EFFECT OF THE AGREEMENTS
Medical records with patient health data, commercial agreements for drugs and equipment, but above all an iron pact for the creation of Sputnik, the anti-Covid vaccine. There is all this behind the warning to Italy and the attack on Defense Minister Lorenzo Guerini by Alexei Vladimorovic Paramonov, 60, former Russian consul in Milan, director of the European Department of the Foreign Ministry who threatened "irreversible consequences »If our country adheres to the new sanctions plan against Moscow, Corriere della Sera wrote:" The fear of diplomacy and intelligence is that retaliation will take place by revealing what really happened starting from March 2020, after the arrival of a delegation of Russians in our country ".
THE THREATS
The doubts about the actual usefulness from the health point of view raised by La Stampa receive as a response from Moscow the threat of the general and spokesman of the Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, who concludes the statement with the sentence: "Whoever digs the grave, ends up inside ".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-ha-russato-in-italia-con-putin-su-sputnik-e-non-solo/ on Mon, 21 Mar 2022 13:15:09 +0000.