Widespread public mistrust of the Russian government has translated into skepticism about coronavirus vaccines, experts say, leaving the country vulnerable to a surge in new Covid-19 cases that is now setting records for severity.
On Saturday, Russia exceeded 1,000 deaths in a 24-hour period for the first time since the pandemic began. (Britain, with a little less than half the population, had 57 deaths in a recent 24-hour period.) On Monday, Russia broke another record with more than 34,000 new infections registered in the previous 24 hours.
Mistrust of the Russian authorities has metastasized since the pandemic began last year, pollsters and sociologists say, and is the main reason only one-third of the country’s population is fully vaccinated so far, even though the shots are free and widely available in the country.
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.
After Sofia Kravetskaya, 36, got vaccinated with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine last December, she said, 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.”
Even with a record-breaking death toll, the government has imposed few restrictions to fight the spread of the virus, and its vaccination campaign has floundered, sociologists say, because of a combination of apathy and skepticism.
“Approximately 40 percent 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 percent 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 Covid-19 statistics that 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 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 which figures to trust.