Hollywood director Oliver Stone claimed in an interview published Tuesday that he recently took Sputnik V, a Russian vaccine candidate President Vladimir Putin overrode medical protocol to approve in August.
Stone said in an interview with The Associated Press he was “hopeful” it will work after hearing “good things” about its efficacy.
Sputnik V is reportedly in wide distribution in Russia and several Latin American countries have agreed to purchase doses, despite the vaccine never making it through Phase Three clinical trials. Despite concerns about its use, Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime in Venezuela and the left-wing government of Argentina have bought millions of doses to begin inoculating their populations.
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The Sputnik V is currently competing with an approved vaccine by the American company Pfizer in tandem with German pharmaceutical corporation BioNTech, several Chinese vaccine candidates, and dozens of others in development around the world.
The Snowden and Wall Street director claimed he had taken the vaccine while speaking to a local media outlet. “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” he admitted. “I got it a few days ago.” Stone said he would get the second dose of the vaccine in 45 days.
The 74-year-old filmmaker appeared to believe consuming the untested medical product served as a political statement. “America somehow in its madness believes that China and Russia are enemies — I don’t,” he added. “I see Russia and China as great partners of ours to fight climate change, to go into the future with.”
Stone is currently in Russia filming a documentary about climate change and has a long history of expressing positive statements regarding the repressive Russian government.
The Oscar-winning director’s admission comes less than two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the government would begin the rollout of mass injections of doctors and teachers, despite skepticism from international health experts about both its safety and efficacy.
According to the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, the Sputnik V vaccine candidate has an efficacy rate of 94 percent, proving it is an “efficient solution to stop the spread of coronavirus infection.” The claim would make the product two percent more effective than the approved Pfizer vaccine.
Science magazine recently noted in their report on the vaccine that Russian trials “covered just 20 total COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] cases in the vaccinated and placebo groups — far too few for the claim be convincing.” In September, more than 30 Europe-based medical experts also signed an open letter publicly expressing their concerns about the Russian research, noting “potential data inconsistencies.”
The Kremlin has accused unspecified global agents of a conspiracy to undermine Sputnik, with the Defense Ministry, describing it as the victim of a foreign-financed “information sabotage” campaign.
Meanwhile, Russian state media has actively engaged in a disinformation campaign aimed at undermining trust in Western vaccine candidates. Last month, an investigation by Politico found that “in state-backed media articles in multiple languages, the Kremlin has pushed claims that Western vaccines are experimental, unsafe and will likely fail.”
Follow Ben Kew on Parler, Facebook, or Twitter. You can email him at bkew@breitbart.com.
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