You probably know that all Russian tests used to detect COVID-19 are made in Novosibirsk, at the state-run Vector Center of Virology and Biotechnology.
Here is their website: http://www.vector.nsc.ru/
If you go there, on the homepage you will see a rotating set of slogans: Vector means professionalism. Vector means uniqueness. Vector means safety.
And right now, we are criticizing Vector at the same time—their tests, apparently, are not of very good quality.
We are also criticizing Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s consumer protection and public health watchdog), which has set up too few laboratories capable of conducting any testing at all.
But we also hope that Russian science will make some contribution to the fight against the coronavirus. We really want to believe in our scientists.
And then we read reports in state media, citing Rospotrebnadzor, saying that Vector has begun testing a coronavirus vaccine.
And once again, we are partly celebrating and partly skeptical. Because this same Rospotrebnadzor is blatantly and massively lying when it says that 143,519 coronavirus tests have already been carried out in Russia.
That would mean that yesterday we were 5th in the world in the number of tests performed. We had supposedly done more of them than Japan, France, and the United States combined. But everyone—and every doctor—knows perfectly well that in Russia it is still practically impossible to get tested for coronavirus. Only if you have serious symptoms, only with a doctor’s referral, and even then you will wait a week for the result.
At the same time, we know that the countries that have so far dealt most successfully with the epidemic—Singapore and South Korea—used rapid mass testing as one of their key strategies.
This is what testing looks like in South Korea:
Here, it’s not just that we see nothing similar. There is nothing even on the horizon.
I spoke about all of this in detail on yesterday’s program.
But I’ve gotten sidetracked from Vector. The question is: can it actually do anything? Is it capable of a breakthrough? Is science still alive?
The most instructive thing you can do in trying to answer these questions is to go to Vector’s vacancies section.
You will find six openings there, and all of them are fresh. They were posted during the epidemic.
They are looking precisely for virologists—specialists in hepatitis, influenza, and bioengineers.
Here is a vacancy in the genomics research department. We, people who supposedly understand nothing, imagine that this is roughly what the search for amazing people who will defeat the epidemic looks like:
Main tasks and responsibilities: Organizing and conducting research work; adapting and culturing viruses; determining the infectious activity (titers) of viruses; assessing viral pathogenicity and immunogenicity. Developing and validating virological and molecular biological methods for studying biologically active compounds. Preparing scientific publications and developing standard operating procedures and other regulatory documents.
Naturally, higher education and an academic degree are required.
Now let’s look at the salary on offer: 14,556 rubles.
That is, $186 a month at the current exchange rate.
That is even less than what is needed to qualify as middle class, according to Vladimir Putin.
Take the time to look through all six vacancies. There is another one with a salary of 15,000 rubles. One offers 20,000 rubles. The highest-ranking employee they are looking for—a senior researcher—is being offered 30,000 rubles.
For that money, the scientist is expected to provide academic leadership to a research group.
In other words, our state is saying: let’s create research groups headed by a guy making 30,000 rubles, who supervises guys making 14,556 rubles. They will definitely defeat the epidemic and deliver a scientific breakthrough for us.
Let me just remind you that for a single episode of International Sawmill (a Russian satirical TV show), state propagandists Margarita Simonyan and Tigran Keosayan receive 4.6 million rubles.
So this family of pointless parasites receives every week, from one TV program alone, as much as 315 researchers—the very people from whom we demand victory over the coronavirus.
The budget of the RT channel, which nobody watches, is 20 billion rubles a year, and they have so much money that they pay half a million rubles a month to all these vile, mugging creeps who mock people for stocking up on pasta at the store:
Yes, unlike Baronova, Krasovsky, Vinokurova, and the other regulars of Moscow’s salon circles, employees of the Vector research center would struggle even to buy pasta. Let’s all laugh at them.
This is simply a catastrophe, my friends. Soon everyone will leave. 377,000 people left Russia in 2017. Obviously, this researcher from Novosibirsk would earn roughly an order of magnitude more in practically ANY job at ANY Western research center.
It is a miracle that some people are still holding on.
And the worst part is that if a researcher earning 14,566 rubles goes to a protest rally to demand a raise, Putin will not send him a higher salary—he will send a National Guard officer with a salary of 45,000 rubles, who will beat the bespectacled nerd over the head with a baton, saying: get back there and invent me a vaccine in silence.