The FT with a startlingly accurate summation of how badly Vlad has fucked up and what an arsehole he is.
Subscribe to read | Financial TimesDubiousness about vaccines partly reflects a distrust of state authorities dating back to pre-Soviet times. Hesitancy towards jabs was already rife pre-pandemic, with measles cases rising.
Rushing to roll out Sputnik jabs before large-scale clinical trials had been concluded further dented confidence.
The authorities have struggled to counter a belief among Russians who have had Covid that natural immunity now makes vaccination unnecessary.
Yet the sham democracy and slavishly propagandistic media of the Putin era have only heightened distrust and a tendency to believe in conspiracies. Levada polling found 61 per cent of respondents agreed coronavirus was a “new form of biological weapon”. Anyone who thinks the virus is man-made is unlikely to see vaccines as an answer.
The 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.
An EU report last month said a systematic disinformation campaign by Russian media to sow doubt about vaccines in the west, with materials on European websites in multiple languages including Russian, had backfired.
In doing so, Moscow has let down its own scientists who rallied to create a vaccine, quite apart from causing thousands of avoidable deaths. In a democracy, leaders responsible for such a situation would, sooner or later, pay a high price at the ballot box. Sadly, Putin’s Russia doesn’t work that way.