“Life punishes those who come too late” is a saying adopted by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev. Markus Söder is the last politician in East and West who wants to be late, he much prefers to play in “Team First” – and yet he has been hit hard. As the very last in the Federal Republic, Markus Söder has now come up with the idea that the production of the Russian corona vaccine Sputnik V in Illertissen, Swabia, might not be such a good idea after all. On Wednesday, in view of the war in Ukraine, he announced the end of the long-cherished plans that the Bavarian side had repeatedly defended. It is the end of a PR air number that was transparent from the start.
At the beginning of April last year, Bavaria signed a letter of intent with the Russian pharmaceutical company R-Pharm Germany to buy 2.5 million doses of the vaccine. And then vigorously advertised for a quick approval of the vaccine. Now in April the vaccine was scarce and the public pressure on Health Minister Klaus Holetschek and his boss Söder to finally get enough vaccine. There is a great temptation to throw smoke screens and to secure first refusal rights for a vaccine that has not yet been approved in Europe. Even then, however, it was foreseeable that a few weeks later there would be an abundance of vaccines, which is why not only Green Party leader Katharina Schulze worked “on the prestige object of the Kremlin”. In fact, the Ministry of Health has never answered the question of what the use of a Russian vaccine can and should actually bring, which according to the state government was not planned for summer 2021 at the earliest – at a time when Söder had long since gone on an advertising tour with it there is still someone who can inject the vaccines from Biontech and Moderna into their upper arms.
Schulze found months ago that Söder was not living up to its European policy responsibilities and criticized the geopolitical dimension of the Sputnik plans. Apart from Bavaria, only Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania had secured a purchase option for the vaccine in the Federal Republic, but this project was put on hold again many months ago – and was thus the penultimate to the finish line.