Terry Prone: We need rigorous testing, not propaganda, to find a vaccine

Putin isn't the first politician to use his daughter — but it needs to stop

Russian President Vladimir Putin: A master of propaganda. Picture: AP

It isn’t just that the mind boggles. It’s that the mind boggles in several different directions at the same time. This multi-platform boggling started when Mr Putin, the 007 wannabe with notions of immortality who runs Russia with an iron hand, announced that his lab guys had come up with a vaccine. Sputnik 5, they’re calling it, which at least speaks to an endangered demographic; those old enough to remember when the USSR put the first satellite into space; the first Sputnik.

Now, of course, whole continents like India are saying “Not fair!” about Russia rolling out the vaccine two weeks from now, and the most popular Professor in Ireland, Luke O”Neill, has curbed his innate enthusiasm about said roll out. He personally wouldn’t be for having it jabbed into him until a lot more tests have happened.

But here’s the thing. Vladimir saw Luke coming, so he did. Vladimir Putin sees around corners and would have anticipated nay-sayers, although, to be fair, our cheery Prof rarely fits under that particular heading. Also, Vladimir Putin is a master of propaganda. 

Think of those heart-stopping shots of him, unclothed as to the chest, riding bare back on a horse whose happiest moment — you just know — was when it got to carry the great man. (The nausea you experience at the memory of the picture will quickly pass, although a lie-down while you chew a dry water biscuit may help.) 

Anticipating that what we still, hopefully, call the free world would rain on Sputnik 5, Putin came up with a master marketing stroke, as a result of which the news went global. The marketing stroke? He jabbed his daughter with the vaccine and — trust Vladimir on this — she’s only flying after it.

That’s where the first boggle surfaces. No before-and-after shots? Or blood tests? Did they take this volunteer, and, pausing only to ensure the vaccine had bedded down in her, shove her into a cave misted with Coronavirus to test if it worked? No details. It’s a simple sum:

Putin’s daughter+vaccine=Russia wins the race.

The simplicity of it is nearly as appealing as President Trump’s certainty that hydroxychloroquine is keeping him right. Of course, some of us “very very nasty” critics of Trump might want to ask if it’s the malaria drug that gives him the wobbles when he essays a mild downward slope, but let us rise above such negativity far enough to make a mild point about Putin’s daughter serving as poster girl for Sputnik-5. 

The point being that we don’t know her from a hole in the ground. Putin’s personal relationships have been shrouded in secrecy from the get-go. He has never deigned to share stuff about his family life, which is not a bad decision for a politician, but, having made that decision and lived by it for yo these many decades, it comes as something of a surprise when he suddenly springs a daughter on us, for no reason other than to fill her full of vaccination juice.

It’s like producing a son nobody never knew you had in order to get him to do the Pepsi challenge. Although, in fairness, being volunteered for a largely untested vaccine is rather more serious than ascertaining soft drink preferences.

But here’s the rub. If we don’t know anything about the daughter, she’s much the same as a character in a bad novel who is introduced in Chapter Four in order to be murdered by the serial killer in Chapter Five. If little Miss Putin (or large Ms Putin) keels over and breathes her last as a result of being volunteered for the coronavirus vaccine, what’s that to us? She isn’t exactly a richly delineated character. 

Just someone hauled out of the wings, put centre stage for an injection and abandoned thereafter. She could have been anybody, you know?

(Well, she could have been anybody other than Mr. Happy, A.K.A. Prof. Luke O’Neill, because he’s ruled himself out of that role. The wider issue here is the question: What is it with male politicians and their daughters? It’s a pretty grim recurring blot on the international political escutcheon, that relationship. Some of us still fight the urge to gag when we recall the Tory minister at the time of Mad Cow Disease, using his daughter to try to persuade the British public to go back to eating meat.

Gummer was the bloke’s name, and his daughter, back 30 years or so ago, was maybe six years of age when her father used her in a photo op where he tried (unsuccessfully) to get her to wolf down a Big Mac in front of the cameras. The kid baulked. 

Undeterred, which is pretty much a constant state with Tory ministers, Gummer turned her to face the camera alongside him. Her gaze path took in the burger and her father with such equal terrified abhorrence, those of us who saw the picture at the time were sure she’d retrospectively sue him for subjecting her to it. But no. Twenty five years later, it emerged that she was heavily involved in running his company.

 That would be the company to which Minister Gummer’s Department had sent many bags of swag in the form of work contracts, which practice you, being naively ethical, might have considered a bit off. But you couldn’t blame the woman, really. Not after such an Adverse Childhood Event.

Quite apart from forced-burger-inhalation, daughters also get paraded when a male politician, says or does something so egregiously sexist and misogynistic as to endanger his tenure. He can't say he didn’t do it, because he did it while we all watched him do it. 

So he falls back on that most creepy of defenses, the “That’s not me” plea. In other words, while casual observers might judge him, based on available evidence, as a paternalistic woman-hating bigot, they’re reading him wrong. That’s not him at all, at all, and he can prove it. (Pause for drumroll.) 

The man then does a self-deprecating half-laughing sigh calculated to cause nausea-onset to a degree close to what the bare-chested, goldfish-gaze shot of Putin engenders. Him, sexist?

Perish the thought. How could he be, in a house dominated by women? He has, he enumerates, two, three, four or even five daughters, who would not tolerate sexist attitudes on his part. Not for a moment. 

This claim is a little subverted, in some instances, by a photograph of him with all of them plus their mother, which makes you wonder about the decades of Valium-laced burgers he must have fed them all in order to get them to line up so subserviently.

And remember the politician who publicly admires one of his daughters and opines that if she were not so closely related to him, he might be dating her?

All this has to stop. Starting with no more politicians using their daughters to promote dodgy vaccines. Rigorous orthodox testing will be grand.