Mayor brands Moscow vaccine refusals ‘astonishing’: Excess deaths due to pandemic much higher than reported Covid toll: WHO

Ag AFP

Moscow: The mayor of Moscow complained on Friday of the "astonishing" number of Russians refusing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus despite continued illnesses and deaths.

Russia registered the world’s first coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V in August 2020, but vaccine scepticism is a major problem in Moscow and other Russian cities. "We continue getting sick, people keep dying, but they don’t want to get vaccinated," Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a video released on Friday.

"The percentage of those vaccinated in Moscow is lower than in any European city." Sobyanin pointed out that Moscow was the first world capital to launch a mass jab campaign but that of its some 12 million residents, only 1.3 million had been vaccinated.

In Moscow, Russian-made vaccines are available for free to anyone who wants them, with vaccination centres set up at prominent sites including shopping malls and parks. Authorities have even introduced some incentives to encourage people to get jabs including small cash payouts to the elderly.

The head of Russia’s Rospotrebnadzor health watchdog, Anna Popova, also made a public call for people to get vaccinated. "Everyone who can be vaccinated today, who has no contraindications, must do this," she said in an interview on state channel Rossiya-24, pointing out that 24-hour vaccination centres were open to all. "This must be done, and it must be done before the summer season" when many Russians will be travelling, she said.

Russia has developed three vaccines, Sputnik V, EpiVacCorona and CoviVac, though most of the attention has focused on Sputnik, named after the first satellite launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1957.

But Russia’s vaccine roll-out has been slow, with only 10.5 million people fully vaccinated in the country of 144 million, according to data collected by monitoring site Gogov from local sources and media reports. The Russian government does not provide regular updates on vaccinations.

According to a recent survey by Russia’s leading independent pollster Levada-Center, 62 percent of Russians are reluctant to be vaccinated with the Sputnik jab, touted by President Vladimir Putin as "the world’s best".

Levada also said that 56 percent of Russians are not afraid of getting the coronavirus. The pollster did not ask Russians why they were hesitant to be vaccinated, but its deputy director Denis Volkov wrote this month that much of the scepticism is the result of mistrust and "growing alienation between citizens and the authorities".

Putin, 68, has repeatedly urged Russians to get the jab and said he himself was vaccinated in private. Russia has lifted nearly all virus-related restrictions and many Russians are refusing to wear masks on public transport and in other public places.

Russia has been among the countries hardest hit by Covid-19, and some experts say authorities vastly underreport coronavirus fatalities. As of Friday, Russian health officials had reported more than 4.9 million coronavirus cases and more than 117,000 deaths.

Meanwhile, up to three times more people have died due to the pandemic than indicated by the officially reported Covid deaths, the World Health Organisation said Friday. So far, more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide have officially been attributed to Covid-19 since the disease first surfaced in China in late 2019.

But according to a global health statistics report from the WHO, far more people have died that would otherwise not have, had it not been for the pandemic, either due to Covid or because they could not get treatment for other ailments. "Total deaths are at least two to three times higher than officially reported," Samira Asma, the WHO assistant director-general in charge of data, told reporters.