3 Sputnik Products Government Should Buy Right Away

Numero Uno. The brand new Sputnik Nasal Vaccine. Both as a booster and as a 2-dose regimen. We know for a fact that different vaccines not only don’t have the same effectiveness in keeping us away from hospitals and the morgue but they are also not terribly good at preventing infection and transmission. As Israel found out even after a fourth dose of Pfizer. That’s because we have no soldiers to prevent Covid-19 from living rent-free in our noses and spreading around. But as the diagram shows – pulled from Sputnik’s Twitter handle along with the pic of how it is administered – a nasal vaccine changes all that by building a wall of immunity at the top of our airways. It would also make our vaccination campaigns a lot more efficient and provide most Mauritians with a better immune response through heterologous boosting. Plus as it’s a spray no needles are involved.

The Sputnik nasal spray offers a higher level of protection against Covid-19 by building a wall of immunity at the entry point of the virus.

Administration of the Sputnik nasal vaccine 

is straightforward. No needles are used.

Dezyem. The Sputnik Light vaccine. As a booster or a standalone jab. As 36,956 Mauritians have already had at least the first dose of Sputnik V (which in fact is the Sputnik Light shot) it makes a lot of sense to offer them the option of continuing with the same excellent vaccine. According to Gamaleya, its maker, the Sputnik booster is supposed to last 12 months. This compares favourably with the 3 to 6 months the Pfizer booster will offer protection. Surely the authorities are not planning to jab the population with a 6th dose of a vaccine designed for the Wuhan strain that’s not exactly dominant now by this December?

Third. Sputnik-M jab for adolescents (12-17). It’s a 2-dose vaccine just like Sputnik V except that its concentration is 5X lower. Buying the Sputnik-M vaccine would be consistent with the recent decision of government to add a non-mRNA vaccine like Novavax to its list of approved vaccines. 

There are issues with mRNA 

vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna. 

Government Should Update Its Vaccine 

Strategy With Official Data It Has Published

It appears that government hasn’t been buying vaccines for quite some time relying totally on shipments that are mufta instead. This has caused a 100% dependence on mRNA vaccines. A very risky decision while it kept collecting Rs2 on each litre of petroleum products and as the Covid-19 death toll approaches 2,500. It is way better off checking our local experience with vaccines so far and adjusting the vaccine strategy accordingly. Especially two facts. One is that unlike the other jabs (see chart) nobody who had done the Sputnik vaccine had died from Covid as of November 7, 2021 – these numbers need to be updated via a parliamentary question ASAP. Two, as we learned last week from our National Assembly, Sputnik had the lowest rate of side effects of four vaccines used in Mauritius. 

If government doesn’t want to buy these Sputnik products – the best vaccine against death and side effects according to its own data and confirmed elsewhere – because it has spent too many billions of our national reserves uselessly or hasn’t heard of long Covid yet then maybe it should give citizens who have already been vaccinated with or view the Russian jabs as among the best in the world the option of paying for it. And make it widely available. 

Finally, given that Pfizer has now made several billions of dollars of profit there’s no need for a consent form as if its vaccine is faulty it should be held accountable. Incidentally that’s the reason why Moderna and Pfizer were not approved by Indian authorities. 

Nobody had died from Covid-19 after being jabbed by the Sputnik vaccine as of beginning of last November. This is consistent with what several other countries have found: Sputnik offers the best protection against death from Covid-19. 

Sputnik had the lowest rate of side effects 

in Mauritius confirming what has been 

observed in a number of countries.

This is a lot higher than the official figure that government doesn’t publish in Mauritius 

but sends to the WHO.

The Sputnik nasal spray should help us keep long Covid and hospitalisation to a minimum accelerating a return to normality. 

Meet the WUT

That’s how people will call the Sir Harold Walter Urban Terminal if the VUT is renamed to honour the memory of one of our land’s finest but completely forgotten sons – SHW built our first and some say still our best motorway which also makes him associated with our transportation network. It’s true he was a pillar of the Labour Party (pictured above with a famous colleague) and we don’t have a Labour PM right now. But we know what happened when we last had one. He actively tried to rewrite the history of the LP and of Mauritius, placing a sycophant at the head of the MBC with a contract that had even a “clause de conscience”. And two of the three Presidents he nominated were not personalities from the oldest political party of Mauritius.

Pravind Jugnauth has everything to gain in making this move. He would rise in stature as a head of government and reap quite a bit of sympathy from hundreds of floating and not-so-floating voters. These are always handy in any election. Besides if I’m not mistaken SHW was the lawyer of SAJ at one time. 

We definitely don’t want to have Victoria in the name of that terminal. That too for several reasons. We’ve been an independent country since 1968 and a Republic for 30 years. Plus Queen Victoria was the monarch on who’s watch at least two famines occurred in India. One such famine is the Great Famine of 1876-1878 during which between 5.6 million and 9.6 million Indians lost their lives – shipping a record amount of wheat to England during that famine didn’t exactly help (Wikipedia). That’s a lot of people. Without blue eyes.

Most of that range exceeds the 6 million of Jews who are assumed to have died in the hands of Nazis of Germany in WWII. Add the one million who died during the Indian Famine of 1896-97 and we’re definitely talking of someone who was the head of state of a colonial power with more blood on her hands than the little guy with a famous moustache. By this yardstick calling it HUT would be a big improvement. 

Furthermore just imagine how embarrassed we’ll look when movies on these famines à la Kashmir Files come out as they inevitably will in a few years. Speaking of embarrassment isn’t it wonderful that we now have a national bird which is alive? Which means we can now think of redesigning our totally irrelevant Coat of Arms.

Finally, we don’t want a statue for the victims of Covid-19 in Souillac. We want it in one of our busiest spots. We’ll be spoilt for choice once we pull down those associated with slavery.