Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. expert on infectious diseases, said the data on the Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine developed in Russia leads him to believe that it’s “quite effective.”

“I’ve taken a look at some of the reports. It looks pretty good,” Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday during the Hugh Hewitt radio show.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in its annual report published in January that its Office of Global Affairs sought to persuade Brazil not to allow the Russian vaccine, accusing Moscow of seeking to expand its influence in the Americas to the “detriment of U.S. safety and security.”

Fauci said he hadn’t had a chance to review a vaccine developed in China but that it “might be good” as well.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-22/fauci-says-russian-covid-vaccine-looks-pretty-effective

Article from 1998

Coming three days after the president’s unsatisfying apology to the nation, and on the same day as Monica Lewinsky’s return to the grand jury, the U.S. military strikes Thursday in Afghanistan and Sudan have skeptics asking: Are they truly a response to the Kenya-Tanzania bombings of American embassies, or a manufactured crisis to divert public attention from his personal troubles? Or, as one reporter asked Defense Secretary William Cohen at a news briefing on the attacks, isn’t there a “striking resemblance” to “Wag the Dog”? Cohen, forced to address the issue, said, in essence, of course not.

For the uninitiated, “Wag the Dog” was the recent Barry Levinson film spoof depicting a White House that invented a war to distract the country from a presidential sex scandal. The similarities between the film and Thursday’s events are just too eerie to ignore.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-aug-21-me-15131-story.html