Why Russia’s Covid death toll is spiking a year after vaccine approval

Russia has reported a record number of Covid-19 deaths as the Delta variant of the virus sweeps across the country.

A total of 799 coronavirus-related deaths were recorded by Moscow on Wednesday - “an all-time high it has reached four times over the past month”, says Reuters. Russia’s coronavirus task force also confirmed 21,571 new cases, a daily total that is “declining gradually” after reaching a peak in July, the news agency adds.

The latest figures take the total number of confirmed Covid deaths in Russia to 167,241 - but some experts believe the true tally could be “triple the official count”, says CNet.

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World’s first Covid jab

Russia has been battling the deadly third wave of Covid infections since June, when Vladimir Putin was forced to row back from his previous “triumphalist claims” about Russia’s “victory” over the pandemic, as the Financial Times reported at the time. The president admitted that the situation had “taken a turn for the worse”, and subsequently announced tough new restrictions including regional lockdowns and compulsory vaccinations.

The resurgence of infections came just under a year after Russia became the first country in the world to approve the use of a Covid vaccine.

In what Science magazine then described as “a startling and confusing move”, Moscow announced in August last year that a registration certificate had been issued for the Russian-produced Sputnik V jab. The certificate “stipulates that the vaccine cannot be used widely until 1 January 2021, presumably after larger clinical trials have been completed”, the specialist news site reported.

Despite this restricted rollout, scientists worldwide “denounced the certification as premature and inappropriate”, added the magazine, which said the vaccine had been tested on “just 76 people”.

However, later Russian trials involving 20,000 people found the efficacy of the jab to be 91.6%. A paper published by UK scientists in The Lancet in February 2021 noted that although the development of the vaccine had been criticised “for unseemly haste, corner cutting, and an absence of transparency”, the data had shown a “clear” outcome with “the scientific principle of vaccination … demonstrated”.

The jab appears to be effective in protecting against the Delta variant too. Health Minister Mikhail Murashko told reporters yesterday that the efficacy of Sputnik V against the highly contagious strain was approximately 83%, reports Moscow-based news agency TASS.

So why are deaths rising?

The contrast between falling Covid death rates in countries such as the UK and the soaring toll in Russia is “all the more striking” given that the latter was the first to approve a coronavirus vaccine - "one based on the same science as the British-Swedish AstraZeneca one and apparently just as effective”, says The Economist.

Yet while roughly 78% of the UK population has received at least one jab to date, only 20% of Russians have had a dose. “The difference is not the availability or the efficacy of the jab but people’s trust in the government and its vaccines,” according to the magazine, which attributes this lack of faith to the Kremlin’s previous response to the pandemic.

When the second Covid wave hit Europe last autumn, the Russian government “chose not to spend money on supporting people and businesses through a new lockdown” and instead “left people to their own devices, playing down the risks”.

And Russia’s “dreadful vaccine hesitancy problem” has been compounded by scepticism about the country’s official Covid death toll, adds CNet. While official statistics put the tally at under 170,000, the number of excess deaths - the total number of deaths above the average count for a given period - during the pandemic stands at 531,000.

“That Vladimir Putin's administration can't be counted on to provide legitimate Covid numbers is part of the problem”, says the news site. “After years of the government sowing disinformation, many Russians don't trust the Kremlin when it tells them to get vaccinated.”

Moscow has also run into delays in getting Sputnik V approved by the European Union’s regulator. Although the vaccine is being used in eastern European countries including Serbia and Hungary, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has yet to give the go-ahead amid claims that Russia “has not been forthcoming with all its paperwork”, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

The EMA has faced repeated delays in its review of Sputnik V owing to a lack of data, “and a separate delegation of French scientists encountered similar roadblocks, despite hopes Sputnik would speed up Europe’s initially-slow vaccination campaign”, the newspaper adds.

Back in Russia, public distrust of the jab has also been fuelled by conspiracy theories surrounding President Putin’s own inoculation, which was “shrouded in secrecy”, as CBS reported last month. The camera-loving Russian leader announced in June that he had received the Russian-made vaccine earlier in the year.

But the lack of fanfare over his inoculation has fuelled speculation Putin has not been jabbed, or at least not with Sputnik V.