Daily Mail: A Russian spy stole AstraZeneca's formula

Daily Mail: A Russian spy stole AstraZeneca's formula

They stole the formula to make their Sputnik V vaccine and became the first country to produce an effective vaccine against COVID, claims the British portal.

Security sources quoted by the Daily Mail claim that the Moscow "mole" managed to steal secret information about the vaccine - although it is not known whether the document was in an Oxford laboratory or in AstraZeneca's factory, or a bottle of vaccine was smuggled them out of the country for further analysis.

Satellite V is said to be "suspiciously similar" to AstraZeneca's vaccine developed at Oxford.

Interior Minister Damian Hinds did not want to comment on the writing of the media. "It is fair to assume that there are some foreign countries that are constantly trying to get sensitive data, including commercial and scientific secrets and intellectual property," he said.

MI5 spies have previously stated that Russian hackers have repeatedly tried to carry out hacker attacks on Oxford since March 2020. Sometime around that time, British scientists announced that Oxford and AstraZeneca had started working on a vaccine against the corona, according to the Daily Mail.

In April last year, Oxford and AstraZeneca announced that the first tests on humans would begin. A month later, Moscow announced that they had developed their own vaccine, and in August, Putin told the Russians in a televised address that their country had won the race for vaccines and produced the first vaccine against COVID-19.

Later, according to the British tabloid, traditionally intolerant of the Russians, it turned out that Sputnik V works in the same way as the British vaccine. These are viral vector vaccines, meaning they use another dormant virus to extract an immune agent that then destroys the coronavirus.

The sequence of events indicates that Moscow was able to get hold of the formula during the first tests on humans. The question is who could be the "mole", as well as whether they were caught.

The tabloid Sun reports that British ministers were told that there was evidence that spies working for the Kremlin stole draft COVID vaccine from a multinational pharmaceutical company in order to make their own vaccine.

A Tory Bob Silly, an expert on Russian politics, says: "I think we need to seriously deal with Russian and Chinese spies. Whether it's stealing the formula for the AstraZeneca vaccine or blackmailing energy sources, it's time to deal with them seriously."

Conservative Andrew Bridgen adds: "We know that Britain has the best scientists and research centers, but Russia probably has the best spies."

Russia's Sputnik V vaccine has passed two clinical trials in Moscow, and the results of those tests were published in the prestigious Lancet magazine, which states that the Russian vaccine is safe and effective. On the other hand, Western scientists believe that the number of tested was too small to say with certainty that the vaccine is safe.