https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8884-6996
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ABSTRACT
Why have Russia and Cuba developed and produced vaccines against COVID-19 while Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are members of the European Union have only played a marginal role in the global supply of such vaccines? We argue that the answer is to be found in the capacity of Russia’s national security state and entrepreneurs to mobilise historic Soviet advantages as part of a broader security motivated statecraft. CEE countries lacked this legacy and this drive. Similarly, they failed to massively invest – as for example, Cuba has – into potential synergies between public health systems and biotech firms.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Vera Šćepanović, Gerhard Schnyder, Petra Guasti, two anonymous reviewers, the participants of an online workshop on Covid-19 in Central and Eastern Europe (May 2021), of the SASE 2021 conference and of the “New Institutionalism” seminar of the ISP PAN in Warsaw (June 2022) for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For example, there were reports that British intelligence had evidence of Russian spies stealing the blueprint for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (Patel and Robinson Citation2021). As social science researchers, we do obviously not have access to such intelligence. Beyond the Kremlin’s dismissal of such claims (Patel, Jewers, and Robinson Citation2021), it should be noted that the Sputnik V vaccine uses a slightly different – human-adenovirus-vector-based – technology from Oxford/AstraZeneca+s chimpanzee-adenovirus-vector-based vaccine. Furthermore, as we document in a more detailed version of the Russian case study, the institutions that developed Sputnik V had already conducted Phase III trials on a similar human-adenovirus-vector-based vaccine technology against Ebola in Guinea in 2017–2019 (Naczyk Citation2021b, 8).
2 It is also noteworthy that, for many years, Russia has been sowing disinformation by claiming that the United States itself has been using laboratories in Ukraine and in other former Soviet republics for producing its own bioweapons. Russia escalated this disinformation campaign after it invaded Ukraine in early 2022 (Lentzos and Littlewood Citation2022).
3 For a more detailed discussion of this period, see Naczyk (Citation2021b).
5 https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/projects/novavax-covid-19-vaccine-manufacturing-facility/
7 Author correspondence with former official at the Ministry of Development.
8 Ibid.
14 https://www.zf.ro/companii/terapia-cluj-demarat-probele-tehnologice-putea-fabrica-romania-19950676
15 Author interview with senior staff in the Ministry of Defence.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marek Naczyk
Marek Naczyk is an Associate Professor of Comparative Social Policy and an Official Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He has previously held appointments at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Sciences Po Paris and the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the influence of interest groups and state actors on the politics of social policy and developmentalism in OECD countries. It has been published in Governance, the Journal of European Public Policy, Politics & Society, the Review of International Political Economy, the Socio-Economic Review, etc.
Cornel Ban
Cornel Ban is an associate professor of International Political economy at Copenhagen Business School. Prior to this he was a Reader at City University of London, assistant professor at Boston University and research fellow at Brown University in the United States. He wrote two books and two dozen articles and book chapters on the politics of economic expertise, policy shifts in international financial institutions and the politics of capitalist diversity in Brazil, Spain, Hungary and Romania. His book (Ruling Ideas: How Neoliberalism Goes Local, Oxford University Press, 2016) received the political economy award for 2017 of the British International Studies Association. Currently, Cornel works on growth regimes, the role of state and finance in decarbonization and the political economy of industrial policy.