Apathy, mistrust in Russia cited for low vaccination rate

MOSCOW — After Sofia Kravetskaya got vaccinated with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine in December, she became a pariah on the Moscow playground where she takes her young daughter.

“When I mentioned I volunteered in the trials and I got my first shot, people started running away from me,” she said. “They believed that if you were vaccinated, the virus is inside you and you’re contagious.”

For Kravetskaya, 36, the reaction reflected the prevalent mistrust in Russian authorities that has metastasized since the pandemic began last year. That skepticism, pollsters and sociologists say, is the main reason only one-third of the country’s population is fully vaccinated, despite the availability of free inoculations.

The reluctance to get vaccinated is producing an alarming surge, experts say.

On Saturday, Russia exceeded 1,000 deaths in a 24-hour period for the first time since the pandemic began. Russia broke another record Monday with more than 34,000 new infections registered in the previous 24 hours.

Only about 42 million of Russia’s 146 million inhabitants have been fully vaccinated, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said last week, a rate well below the United States and most countries in the European Union.

But even with a record-breaking death toll, the government has imposed few restrictions, and its vaccination campaign has floundered, sociologists say, because of a combination of apathy and mistrust.

“Approximately 40% of Russians do not trust the government, and those people are among the most active who refuse the vaccines,” said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling operation.

In August, one of its polls showed that 52% of Russians were uninterested in being vaccinated.

Some demographers have questioned the veracity of the numbers the government reports, further damaging its credibility. Russia’s statistics agency reported Friday, for instance, that more than 43,500 people died from covid-19 in August.

But another state body, the national covid-19 task force, initially registered fewer than 25,000 fatalities that month, according to calculations by the independent Moscow Times. The discrepancies leave Russians not knowing what numbers to trust.