During an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, Anthony Fauci offered his assessment of the Sputnik V vaccine produced by Russia:

HH: All right. Do you trust the Russian and/or the Chinese vaccine to be efficacious?
AF: You know, I’m assuming that they are. I mean, certainly the data on the Russian vaccine, I’ve taken a look at some of the reports. It looks pretty good. The Chinese one very well might be good. I haven’t had the opportunity to examine the data to the extent that I would feel comfortable. But the Russian one, I believe, is quite effective.

The top government expert on infectious diseases might have a point. In early February, a peer-reviewed study, which included some 20,000 participants, found the vaccine to be almost 92 percent effective, despite earlier concerns about its safety and efficacy. (It was approved, following limited clinical trials, in August. At the time, Fauci panned Russia’s hasty approval of the shot.) Still, some have their doubts.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on February 18, “We still wonder why Russia is offering theoretically millions of millions of doses while not sufficiently progressing in vaccinating their own people.”

It’s a fair question, considering the breadth of Russia’s vaccine diplomacy. Although its own vaccine rollout has proceeded slowly, Moscow has shipped millions of doses abroad (though at volumes lower than promised). In fact, as the Russian government’s vaccine domestic drive lagged, it placed resources behind a disinformation effort to sow doubt in the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine. Meanwhile, certain Russian officials have voted with their feet, including a diplomat posted in Estonia, who opted to receive the Pfizer shot instead.

Should Fauci offer such a sanguine view of the Sputnik shot? His perspective might be more confident than that of Vladimir Putin, who is expected to be inoculated today. The Russian president won’t reveal the name of the shot that he will receive, though the Kremlin promises it will be one of the three Russian-produced vaccines, according to Reuters. A government spokesperson said that Putin “has already done a lot to promote Russian-made vaccines, the most famous of which is Sputnik V” and “that Putin did not like the idea of being vaccinated on camera.”