Evening Medusa

Dmitry Gudkov left Russia. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the third Russian vaccine against covid. How an attempt to bring advanced pharmaceutical technologies to Russia ended in arrests

Good evening,

This is Meduza's daily newsletter about the important news of the day. And on Mondays we also talk about what happened over the weekend. Let's start this letter by meeting an English seal who was tired and wanted to rest. A resident of Dorset named Cenk Albayrak-Tue and his stand-up paddleboard helped him with this. The seal, however, turned out to be somewhat unceremonious .

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Pulse

The main thing is point by point

• Politician Dmitry Gudkov left Russia for fear of being arrested. Now he is in Kyiv. A court in Moscow fined him for participating in a January rally in support of Navalny.
• Rezo Gabriadze, an artist, playwright, and author of the scripts “Mimino” and “Kin-dza-dza!”, has died .
• In Moscow , 19 people were detained after a mass brawl with shooting.
• Alexey Navalny dropped two lawsuits against the administration of IK-2 in Pokrov. Because he was given the Koran and the Bible, and articles from his newspapers are no longer cut out.
• Former police officers accused of fabricating a criminal case against Ivan Golunov have appealed the verdict .
• The State Duma proposed tracking money transfers to citizens and legal entities from abroad.
• Roskomnadzor was sued for slowing down Twitter .
• Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have a daughter . This is the couple's second child.

Text of the day

The federal target program “Pharma 2020” was supposed to help transfer Western technologies and medicines to Russia. As a result, there are fewer drugs than arrests

Among those arrested were officials of the Ministry of Industry and Trade Olga Pokidysheva and Olga Kolotilova, member of the executive committee of the Russian Olympic Committee Alexey Vlasenko and businessmen Vladimir Zubkov and Vladimir Novakovsky. All of them are suspected of fraud, all of them are united by participation in the Pharma 2020 program. Meduza special correspondents Svetlana Reiter and Ivan Golunov found out how all these arrests are connected, what results Pharma 2020 produced, and how the project to transfer advanced technologies to Russia, of which the state decided to become a venture investor, worked .

Coronavirus

Is the third Russian vaccine, CoviVac, really better than Sputnik V?

CoviVac is not as actively promoted as Sputnik, but many trust the reputation of its developer, the Center named after. M.P. Chumakov, where they created drugs for polio and encephalitis. In addition, CoviVac is made using the oldest technology for this type of drug - it is an inactivated (“killed”) pathogen virus with the addition of a universal immune stimulant. And the vaccine is difficult to get, which is also why it began to be called the best. Let’s figure out whether this is true or not and whether CoviVac has any real advantages.

Other news about coronavirus:

• Montenegro has lifted all entry restrictions for tourists from Russia . But there is still no direct air service between the countries.
• Brazilhas authorized the use of Sputnik . A month ago, the country's medical regulator said that the vaccine contained “live” adenoviruses.
• Donald Trump spoke in public for the first time in three months. And he demanded that China pay the world $10 trillion for the pandemic.
• MMA fight presenter and actor Artem Anchukov has died.

Podcast “What Happened”

The head of the Ministry of Health is confident that “everything is calm” in Russia with Covid. But the numbers say otherwise

Vaccination in Moscow has practically stopped. It will take years to vaccinate 60% of the city's population, as Russian authorities have said. The number of hospitalizations is rising again and, according to the aggregator gogov.ru, “approaching the peaks of mid-May and January.” In the new episode of the podcast, we discuss coronavirus together with Meduza science editor Alexander Ershov and editor of the “Analysis” department Dmitry Kuznets.

Listen to “What Happened” on Meduza (when we sent this letter, the new episode had not yet been released). But very soon it will appear on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Castbox , Yandex.Music and other podcast services.

Half perk of the day

Or what we learned about the Russian language from our readers

On Sunday we asked readers to tell us about the words that are used in the regions where they live. As a result, more than two thousand messages were sent to us, and based on them we compiled a selection of 35 words that you immediately want to learn and start using with or without reason . In general, she’s still a plum! And a semi-perdenchik, by the way, is a short coat or jacket.

We call the rook and go to Tiguli, your “Medusa”