Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Russians say nyet to vaccinations
Mistrust in officials a major reason behind lack of inoculations
MOSCOW — After Sofia Kravetskaya got vaccinated with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine last 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 Wednesday, the nation reported 1,028 coronavirus deaths in a 24-hour period.
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, 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.
“It’s about trust and approval in the government and the president,” he said. “Those who trust, they are much more ready to do it.”
Some demographers have questioned the veracity of the numbers the government reports, further damaging its credibility. Russia’s statistics agency said Friday, for instance, that more than 43,500 people died from COVID-19 in August. But another state body, the national COVID19 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.
The Kremlin is concerned with the rising numbers. President Vladimir Putin asked parliamentarians to promote vaccination last week, saying, “People trust and listen to your advice and recommendations.”
But in a rare critique of Kremlin policy, parliament speaker and Putin ally, Pyotr Tolstoy, said the approach of “we told you, you do it,” was not working.
Any new push to encourage vaccinations may be far behind the curve, Volkov said. The government’s initial nonchalance about the pandemic engendered a casual view of the virus in too many Russians.
“From the very beginning there was no definite message that COVID-19 is harmful,” Volkov said. “This momentum was lost, and now it is very hard to implant.”
He noted that Putin and other influential politicians and public figures were not first in line to receive the vaccine. Putin was vaccinated behind closed doors in March, announcing only in late June that it was with Sputnik V, although the Russian Ministry of Health approved the jab in August 2020. In general, the Kremlin’s position has been that regional governors should set restrictions. Thirty-eight of 85 Russian regions have introduced some form of mandates for public employees. In some, events of more than 2,000 or 3,000 have been banned.
But restrictive mitigation measures have in large part been avoided. Over the summer, the Moscow government imposed an order mandating that 60% of service workers be vaccinated, but critics say it is not enforced. In August, the mayor canceled a shortlived program tying access to indoor venues to QR codes proving vaccination because it was so unpopular.
The government is reluctant to impose restrictions because they do not want to “mess with this majority of people,” who oppose them, said Aleksandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist who researches COVID-19-related misinformation at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
She said her research showed that many Russians believed that political, rather than epidemiological, concerns drove policy. For instance, she said, restrictions were loosened before September parliamentary elections, which she and others perceived as a political move to ensure that the ruling United Russia party did not lose support.
Arkhipova suggested another possible reason for the low level of vaccinations: a diminishing sense of social responsibility in the three decades since the communist Soviet Union collapsed.
“Russians are no more a people of the collective,” she said. “Now the people became quite individualistic, and the concept of ‘the public good’ is very hard to explain.”
Finally, Arkhipova said, Russians are skeptical of the Sputnik V vaccine itself. While 70 countries have approved Sputnik V, according to its developer, the state-backed Russian Direct Investment Fund, there was much initial wariness of the vaccine because of the secretive and unusually speedy process of its development and approval in Russia.