Russia: reasons for its low progress in immunization despite developing one of the first vaccines

Russia has been exceeding its maximum COVID-19 contagion day by day and today’s latest figures are no exception: 34,303 reported cases, the fourth consecutive daily maximum since the beginning of the pandemic. This places Russia as the fifth country in the world that has registered the highest number of infections with more than 7.8 million and more deaths (217,000).

In August 2020, President Vladimir Putin announced his vaccine against coronavirus, Sputnik V, developed by the National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology (Gamaleya) together with the Ministry of Defense.

Despite this early announcement, which placed Russia at the forefront of the global race that had begun to achieve a vaccine against the new coronavirus, the numbers of immunized are low: only 31% of the inhabitants of Russia are completely vaccinated and only an additional 3% are partially vaccinated, according to figures from Our World in Data from the University of Oxford.

What’s going on?

The low number of vaccinated is not related to the lack of vaccines, as can happen with nations that do not have access, but to the resistance of the population to get them.

Only 54% of Russians said they would not get the vaccine if it is not mandatory, while 38% said they would, according to a survey by the Levada Center.

“Certainly the figures [la tasa actual de mortalidad por COVID-19] they are terrible. It is alarming. The main reason is the low levels of vaccination “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on October 5, according to the BBC.

Alexandra Arkhipova, senior researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, told the BBC and clarified that these people who refuse to be immunized are not necessarily anti-vaccines.

“Many have not been vaccinated not because they are convinced anti-vaccines, but because they have decided to wait. Many people say they are not ready to get vaccinated because they do not trust the way Sputnik V was designed. They are extremely upset at the lack of information about how it was made, what its side effects were, how many people got sick, how severe or mild was the disease, how many of those vaccinated were hospitalized, etc. “, said.

As in other parts of the world, in Russia also hoaxes and misinformation against vaccines have been abundant and have an impact on people.

As Arkhipova explained, until July of this year they had accumulated a database with some 314 different rumors about the coronavirus, of which “83 are related to vaccines and had been shared 2.6 million times on social networks ”.