Doctors fighting vaccine refusal as “this wave ... it is like a war”

Most important, Bishop Ambrose of Giurgiu told worshippers in this small Romanian town on Oct. 14, “don’t rush to get vaccinated.”

The bishop is now under criminal investigation by the police for spreading dangerous disinformation, but his anti-vaccine clarion call, echoed by prominent politicians, influential voices on the internet and many others, helps explain why Romania has in recent weeks reported the world’s highest per capita death rate from COVID19.

On one recent day, nearly 600 Romanians died, the most during the pandemic. The country’s death rate relative to population is almost seven times as high as the United States’, and almost 17 times as high as Germany’s.

“This wave is far worse than the others — it is like a war,” said Dr. Anca Streinucercel, who works at the biggest infectious disease hospital, Bals National Institute, in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. “We go into our wards but don’t know when we will come out.”

Six ambulances carrying COVID-19 patients needing urgent help waited outside for medical workers to find space inside overflowing wards.

What makes the surge particularly difficult, Streinu-cercel said, is that it could have been easily avoided. A few who got shots fell seriously ill, she said, but this was because their immune systems had been compromised by treatment for cancer or other illnesses. “The only real reason anyone is here is because they did not get vaccinated,” she said.

Vaccine hesitancy, stoked by powerful forces online and in the real world, has left Romania with Europe’s second-lowest vaccination rate; around 44% of adults have had at least one dose, ahead of only Bulgaria, at 29%. Overall, the European Union stands at 81%, with several countries above 90%. Complicating matters, Romania has been without a government since last month, when a centrist coalition unraveled.

Bulgaria, too, has a very high COVID-19 mortality rate, with already overwhelmed hospitals flooded by new patients. This past week, one of the big hospitals in the capital city, Sofia, issued a plea for medical students and volunteers to help.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic nation where vaccine hesitancy is particularly strong within its large ethnic Russian population, last month became the first EU member to go into a full lockdown since the early phase of the pandemic in 2020. Russia, where less than half of the adult population has been even partly inoculated, and Ukraine, where the rate is below one-third, have also reimposed sweeping restrictions amid surging cases.

Stubborn vaccine resistance across such a broad array of countries has left many looking for answers in the one thing that unites them: their shared communist past and widespread disenchantment with the disarray and corruption that followed.

“Fake news has a huge influence on our population, and in Eastern Europe in general,” said Valeriu Ghorghita, an army colonel leading Romania’s vaccination effort. “Something we all have in common in this part of Europe is our political history of communism.”

Under leaders like Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s longtime dictator, who was overthrown and executed in 1989, “nobody trusted their neighbors, nobody trusted the authorities, nobody trusted anybody,” Ghorghita said.

Romania began vaccinating its citizens last December and put the program under the military, the country’s most respected