From the MT:
“Russia's Unprecedented
Mandatory Vaccination Push Divides Society”
On the morning of June 16,
employees at Moscow coffee-shop chain Skuratov were told they’d have to get
vaccines against the coronavirus if they wanted to keep their jobs. “We got a
message from our management that we’ll need to schedule our appointment,” said
Masha Zubrilina, a twenty-three-year-old barista. “The majority of my coworkers
will do it.” Later that day, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced the world’s
widest-reaching compulsory Covid-19 vaccination policy, decreeing that state
and service sector workers would be required to have jabs to counteract what he
called a “dramatic” public health situation. Moscow’s push for mandatory
vaccination underlined a failing vaccination program, which has seen only
around 13% of residents receiving jabs despite their free availability in the
Russian capital since December. “It’s not ideal and I wish the choice was
ours,” said Zubrilina, who said she would make a vaccination appointment for
the following week. “But the situation
is bad. Many of my friends have got sick.” Sobyanin’s call for mandatory
vaccinations — requiring businesses to ensure 60% of their employees are dosed
— reflects a worsening pandemic situation in the Russian capital and will
affect two million people.
Even as Europe and North America
have seen cases and mortality in steady decline amid wide-ranging inoculation,
in Russia daily case increases have returned to last year’s peak, with Moscow
authorities warning that the capital is running out of hospital beds. Despite
over 60% of Russians opposing obligatory vaccinations, according to a poll
released Thursday, authorities in other regions have announced similar moves,
and President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has backed the policy. Experts
have blamed the situation on widespread vaccine skepticism among the Russian
population, and on the Russian authorities’ reluctance to enter a new lockdown
after largely abandoning pandemic restrictions last summer. “This has been on
the horizon in Moscow for a while,” said Vasily Vlassov, an epidemiologist and
former adviser to the Russian Health Ministry and World Health Organization. “[The
authorities] messed up and are panicking. Vaccination is needed, but it will
only have the desired impact after two to three weeks. We need to introduce a
lockdown as soon as possible but the authorities don’t want to.” Epidemiologists
like Vlassov also worry that mutated strains believed to be more contagious
than the original virus are behind the surge in numbers. The chief doctor of Moscow's main Covid-19
hospital, Denis Protsenko, said last week that hospital patients were not
responding to treatments that were previously effective, indicating that
mutated Covid-19 strains are present in the capital.
The controversial decree has won
cautious support from Moscow businesses, who will bear responsibility for
ensuring employees are vaccinated, but who also see mandatory jabs as a way to
avoid a new and potentially expensive lockdown. “Fatalities in Russia are
accelerating — it’s necessary to protect people from this incredibly dangerous
virus,” said restaurant owner Alesa Romanova, head of the 354 Group, who backed
the measures. “We will be vaccinating
all our staff as soon as possible — we’ll tell them it’s a mandatory step to
defeat the pandemic.” But as with Russia’s nationwide vaccination campaign,
weak demand rather than short supply has been the major drag on uptake,
business owners say. Fast food outlet Teremok provides a snapshot of the
potential problem. Owner Mikhail Goncharov said only 15% of his 2,000 Moscow
employees have been vaccinated so far — and only a third are prepared to do so
in the future. In order to meet the 60% threshold laid down in the decree, he
will need to convince at least 200 to change their minds. “Ordinary people just
need a little push,” he said. “But I believe that everybody who wants to work
in the restaurant industry should be vaccinated.”
Farming out Some
observers, however, see the mandatory vaccine program as the farming out of
Moscow’s coronavirus response to businesses. “This shows that the
government has no grand strategy to deal with Covid,” said Tatyana Stanovaya,
founder of the R.Politik political consultancy. Russia’s leaders have been
reluctant to push ahead with plans for mandatory vaccination — as recently as
May 27, Putin called the idea “impractical and impossible.” “The federal
authorities are shifting the responsibility to the regions, who are in turn
shifting responsibility onto business,” Stanovaya added. Answering a
question about whether Russia’s vaccination campaign has failed, Putin's press
secretary Peskov said Thursday that "governors are responsible" for
the vaccination drive in their own regions.
Amid such political pressure, as
well as forced closures, curfews, non-working weeks and lost income, firms in
the capital have long complained about insufficient support from the
government, which has reserved its most generous financial handouts for the
country’s largest — often state-controlled — enterprises. “I support
vaccinations, but businesses need to carry on working,” said Andrey Kovalev,
head of the Russian Entrepreneurs’ Movement. “Absolutely nobody is talking
about additional support for businesses.” He said the government should take on
more of the costs for promoting the vaccine and use some carrots as well as
sticks. He and others have suggested free metro cards or even cash handouts of
up to 10,000 rubles ($140), rather than just threats of fines — up to one
million rubles ($14,000) — or forced closure for businesses that don’t meet the
60% threshold by July 15. Practical hurdles could also thwart employers’
ability to hit the target. Many migrant workers in the capital, including
couriers and taxi drivers, are currently unable to get the vaccine in free
state clinics. Without a more sustained government push, Kovalev fears it may
be too late for businesses themselves to whip up demand. “We’ve already lost the fight against
disinformation on the internet — all the myths about Bill Gates, microchips,
deaths and bad side effects of the vaccine are already in people’s heads,” he
said. According to a February survey by the independent Levada Center pollster,
64% of Russians believe the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus is a
bioweapon created by humans. “I am categorically against this,” said Galina, a
thirty-four-year-old cashier at supermarket chain Vkusvill, who cited a common
online conspiracy theory that Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has adverse effects on
women’s fertility. “I don’t think I need a vaccine. My immunity is strong
enough to battle the virus if I get sick.”
Political risks With such
high levels of vaccine hesitancy, the move toward mandatory inoculation also
represents a political risk for the Kremlin. With high-stakes elections
to Russia’s State Duma lower house of parliament coming in September — and the
ruling United Russia party looking weak in the polls — compulsory jabs threaten
to alienate voters sceptical of vaccination and unaccustomed to the state
meddling in their personal lives. “Compulsory vaccination is amoral,
illegal,” said Yevgeny Stupin, a Communist lawmaker in the Moscow City Council,
who has campaigned against pandemic restrictions, alongside much of his party.
“Vaccination is a personal choice. These vaccines haven’t been fully
tested, we don’t know what their side effects are.”
Victory over the virus According
to R.Politik’s Stanovaya, the move is less a risk to the Kremlin’s political
prospects than an indictment of its broader handling of the pandemic. She noted
that senior officials, including Putin, have repeatedly declared victory over
the virus in recent weeks. “They are acting from a position of
weakness,” she said. “For a long time the Kremlin was saying it had defeated
the pandemic.” “Now, doctors are panicking and the authorities have no
choice but to act. But at the same time people don’t want to get vaccinated. So
the government needs to find a balance.” On the ground in Moscow,
however, service employees are already thinking up ways to sidestep the new
requirements. “I am going to ask
my bosses to make me one of the 40% that doesn’t need to get vaccinated,” said
29-year-old electronics shop worker Dmitry. “I don’t trust this vaccine.” “These
compulsory measures are absurd, unconstitutional. But what can I do? I’d like
to keep my job.”
^ It is one thing to make getting
a Covid Vaccine mandatory for certain critical jobs like those working around
the sick and the disabled and another thing to require every single person in
every single job in a whole city or region to get vaccinated. That is a
far-stretch even for Russia. On top of that they will be forced to take one of
the unproven Russian Covid Vaccines. This all but proves that Russia’s “official”
Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths are not the real truth in the
country – they are much higher. ^
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