Polio outbreak in Japan | Lessons of playing vaccine politics

History is teaching us an important lesson that playing politics with vaccination campaign in the midst of a deadly pandemic is immoral and costs lives. A Step, a 1988 Soviet-Japanese movie directed by Alexander Mitta, is about a struggle to bring a safe and effective Soviet vaccine against polio to Japan in the end of 1950s to help the country fight a deadly outbreak of the disease. The story is very much reminiscent of our effort to bring Sputnik V vaccine to different countries to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. Pharmaceutical giants with the help from some bureaucrats and biased media put up a resistance to Soviet vaccine imports, maintaining an artificial deficit of polio vaccines in the country in order to protect their monopoly and revenues at the expense of suffering children.