Has Russia’s vaccine disinformation campaign fatally backfired?

Russia has set a new record for Covid-19 deaths amid low vaccine take-up even as a fourth wave of the virus sweeps across the nation.

Officials yesterday reported a record 1,189 coronavirus-related deaths over the previous 24 hours, taking the total confirmed toll to 242,060. And “the government's own data on excess mortalities” points to the actual death tally being “significantly higher”, said CBS News.

Moscow has been waging a campaign of “vaccine misinformation” since the early days of the pandemic, said the Financial Times (FT). But combined with “poor handling” of domestic outbreaks, the push to undermine Western jabs has “intensified an enduring distrust of state authorities” – with fatal results.

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Lockdown scepticism

Some analysts have suggested that the “alarming” number of Covid deaths in Russia may be “the highest in Europe per capita”, yet the Russian authorities have “been reluctant to take decisive action”, said CBS News.

But following consecutive days of record deaths and infections – with more than 40,000 new cases recorded on Wednesday – the government’s Covid taskforce has imposed “a nationwide workplace shutdown”, Reuters reported.

Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have “avoided using the term lockdown”, in apparent recognition of “the unpopularity of such anti-virus measures among the Russian public”, CBS News added.

The government has also “delegated responsibility for lifting or extending the restrictions to regional governors”, prompting experts to “cast doubt on the efficacy” of the resulting patchwork of measures.

Asked by reporters yesterday if Putin was considering extending the workplace shutdown, the president’s spokesperson said that “no decisions on this score have been made”.

“The presidential decree introduced a period of non-working days through 7 November,” the spokesperson continued. “If any other decisions are adopted, we'll let you know immediately.”

Disinformation backfire

Russia's Rosstat state statistics agency reported last week that 44,265 people died of coronavirus in the country in September – double the earlier official government figure.

“That brings the agency's tally of Covid-19 deaths in Russia to nearly 450,000, the highest toll in Europe,” said The Moscow Times. Government figures “only take into account fatalities where the virus was established as the primary cause of death after an autopsy” , the paper explained. But Rosstat “publishes figures under a broader definition for deaths linked to the virus”.

According to the agency's figures, September was Russia’s “deadliest” month in terms of excess deaths “since the Second World War”, said Bloomberg.

The current surge comes “amid low vaccination rates, lax public attitudes towards taking precautions and the government’s reluctance to toughen restrictions”, said euronews.

Latest Oxford University tracking showed that just 33% of Russians had been fully vaccinated as of yesterday, while a further 5.8% had received only one dose. The jab rate has remained stubbornly low despite Moscow having “approved a domestically developed vaccine against the coronavirus months before most countries”, the news site noted.

The FT reported that “Russia has among the lowest uptakes of any large economy”, an outcome driven by “official mishandling, popular distrust – and disinformation efforts that backfired by knocking confidence in jabs and fuelled conspiracy theories”.

Some “dubiousness” over vaccines “reflects a distrust of state authorities dating back to pre-Soviet times”, but Moscow’s decision to “roll out Sputnik jabs before large-scale clinical trials had been concluded further dented confidence”, said the paper. And “sham democracy and slavishly propagandistic media of the Putin era have only heightened distrust and a tendency to believe in conspiracies”.

“Criticism of foreign-made vaccines by Putin and state media, intended to boost Sputnik, instead convinced many Russians that if international products were not much good, their own version was surely worse,” the FT concluded.

Examples of how Russian authorities have sought to undermine the effectiveness of Western jabs include claims that the vaccines could turn people into monkeys. Russia Today also published an article by a doctor who backed Nicki Minaj’s claims about Covid vaccines having side effects including swollen testicles.

But in working to downplay the West’s vaccine development, Russia has “let down its own scientists who rallied to create a vaccine”, the FT argued. And that is “quite apart from causing thousands of avoidable deaths”.