The strange case of Sputnik V: dozens of countries buy doses, but only 3.5% of Russians have been vaccinated

Although Russia was the first country to announce the approval of a vaccine against COVID-19, the vaccination rate of the population does not match that of other countries with their own formulations, such as the United States. or the United Kingdom.

More akin to what the saying goes “in the house of a blacksmith’s knife stick” than a nation that trusts what its scientists have developed, while dozens of countries like Argentina, Mexico and Iran have ordered millions of doses of its Sputnik V vaccine, in Russia the vaccination campaign has failed and shows one of the highest wavering levels in the world.

While the vaccine is free and widely available, only 3.5% of Russians have received at least one dose. According to surveys by Our world in data, a University of Oxford-based project that tracks the global vaccine launch, in the US the figure jumps to 17.1% and in the UK to 32.1%.

So things, Recent polls show less than a third of Russians are ready to receive the Sputnik V vaccine. The cause? A publication of The Wall Street Journal assures that “behind the skepticism there are lingering doubts about the rapid development of Sputnik V and a deep-rooted mistrust of the authorities derived from the country’s Soviet past”. Investigations also show that many Russians believe the coronavirus is a man-made biological weapon.

And, despite the fact that new cases of COVID-19 in Russia have declined, experts believe the slow acceptance of the vaccine is leaving the country – which had more than four million people infected, being the world’s fourth by number of cases. – on the verge of undermining the government’s goal of vaccinating around 60% of the population by the summer.

“We were on par with everyone in the development of the vaccine, but now we are behind in its administration.”, reconoció Anton Gopka, decano of the facultad de management tecnológica e innovaciones in the Universidad ITMO de San Petersburgo y socio general de la firma de inversión en atención médica ATEM, para quien, “al final, el gran riesgo es that the pandemic continues in the country”.

However, the concern does not seem to be the same among the population. Vadim Ivanov is a 55-year-old driver of the maintenance department of the city of St. Petersburg, and on this subject he said that he does not trust the government or the health system and believes that the threat of COVID- 19 was exaggerated. .

“I’m not going to get a vaccine because I don’t believe in the coronavirus; it’s all about hoaxes “says Ivanov, who rarely wears a mask and rarely practices social distancing. “People say everything is absurd, everything is implausible, everything is made up.”

As, To speed up the vaccination process, Russian authorities eliminated priority vaccination groups and opened the vaccination campaign to everyone in January.. Likewise, They have set up vaccination centers in food courts, opera houses and shopping malls, and some offer free ice cream for every take. But nothing seems to convince the average citizen of the Soviet country.

“There is no shortage of vaccines,” said Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, recently. But neither can we say that there is a rush ”to get injected.

The Russian President, Vladimir Putin doesn’t miss an opportunity to hail the development of the Gamaleya Institute in the number of public appearances he has, but he has yet to be vaccinated. They say he plans to do it in late summer or early fall after seeing doctors. It would be around September.

For Gopka, “the government needs to do a better job of communicating the benefits of the vaccine.” “And, of course, people would feel more comfortable if the head of state accepted it,” he noted.

The Sputnik V vaccine has faced different challenges since its origins: was approved in August, just a few months after the start of development and before the conduct of large-scale clinical trials. Then, when Russia started implementing it in December, production issues meant the country could only deliver a fraction of the doses it initially promised.

A peer-reviewed study published last month in the medical journal The Lancet, showed that the vaccine was 91.6% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and had no serious side effects.

During, Russian drugmakers recently increased production, but some analysts expect a glut of vaccines if demand does not increase.

Abroad, more than 40 other countries have cleared Sputnik V for emergency use. Among them, Slovakia and Hungary, members of the European Union (EU), have approved the Russian formulation despite the bloc’s drug regulatory agency just starting a formal assessment last week that could lead to authorization of the injection.

In this context, yesterday, the president of the European Medicines Agency, Christa Wirthumer-Hoche, estimated in a talk show on the Austrian channel ORF, that the data to be analyzed are not available and advised against its authorization. “We need documents that we can review. We still have no data […] on vaccinated people. There is a stranger. This is why I advise against granting a national authorization in an emergency, ”said the official.

That is why, perhaps, many Russians are not convinced.

This was demonstrated by a survey released this week by independent pollster Levada Center, which found that only 30% of Russians are ready to be shot by Sputnik V, up from 38% in December. Regarding the reasons for the denial, many raised concerns about possible side effects and doubts about clinical trials.

“The vaccine has not yet been fully tested and [la campaña de vacunación masiva] it is in fact a lawsuit which is carried out en masse on the residents of Russia without their knowledge ”said Tatyana Andreyeva, a 39-year-old human resources manager from Kaliningrad. She said she would not be vaccinated.

Her 10-year-old son fell ill with COVID-19 last October, but recovered quickly without infecting the rest of the family. “I do not consider this to be a serious and highly contagious disease,” he said.

Globally, Russians are among the most skeptical of vaccines. An Ipsos poll published in February showed that 42% of Russians would receive a vaccine, compared to 71% in the United States and 57% in France.

In addition to doubts about Sputnik V, analysts point to a general lack of confidence in the authorities and the health system.

After the end of the Soviet Union, funding for the health care system collapsed, many highly skilled health professionals emigrated, and medical research slowed down.

“No one has touched the infrastructure of the system since the late 1950s,” then health minister Veronika Skvortsova said in 2019.

The Levada investigation further found that two-thirds of those polled believed the coronavirus to be an artificial biological weapon.

“There is an extremely weak pattern of trust in all kinds of official authorities, other political institutions and the health system,” said Margarita Zavadskaya, political science researcher at the European University of Saint Petersburg.

KEEP READING: