“It is guaranteed safe and effective,” says a voice with what’s probably meant to be a heavy Russian accent. “How do we know? Because it was tested on a bear, by a scientist who is also a bear.” This is an excerpt from a September edition of The Daily Show, and the subject was the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V. It hasn’t aged well: Now that a peer-reviewed article in The Lancet has established Sputnik as safe and effective, the initial failure of many countries to believe in it looks like a missed opportunity.

The list of countries ordering the Sputnik vaccine is now growing. But given that Russia approved Sputnik back in August, long before any other vaccine got the greenlight, why didn’t it achieve wider use more quickly? Why didn’t the European Union, which faces a massive vaccine shortage, order it along with other vaccines which also weren’t yet approved when the orders were being made?

There’s a simplistic answer to these questions: Because the West believes its own propaganda. All that bear stuff — can you imagine a 2020 U.S. TV program mocking Chinese or Indians in that way, fake accent and all? As Thomas Friedman recently declared in The New York Times, “The only Russian exports that appeal to Westerners are caviar, vodka and nesting dolls — and we’re full up on all three.” Such stereotypes make it hard to believe that Russia is capable of producing a genetically engineered vaccine that’s easier to store and transport and cheaper to produce than the universally recognized Pfizer vaccine.

But then, the whole idea of fighting COVID rests on listening to experts. And the experts knew that no bears were involved in Sputnik V’s design. Its chief developer, Denis Logunov, is a much-published, respected microbiologist — and he’s only 42, not a Soviet-era dinosaur. In 2016, he and a team from his research center, the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology, were responsible for the development of an Ebola vaccine, which is cleared for use in Russia and has shown a good efficiency level in tests — even as two other Western-developed vaccines have been approved for use in Africa and the Russian one still hasn’t. More recently, the team worked on a vaccine against the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, caused, like COVID-19, by a coronavirus. Because of their Ebola and MERS experience, Logunov and his team were ahead of many others when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. They used the same approach — it was “literally copy and paste,” Logunov explained in a rare interview with the Latvia-based website Meduza last year.

In other words, the right people knew the Russian vaccine effort was as serious as any other. And yet that knowledge didn’t translate into acceptance and orders.

Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He recently authored a Russian translation of George Orwell’s “1984.”