Russian Health Minister May Be Sacked for Slow Response to Pandemic

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 14 – Yekaterinburg’s URA news agency is reporting that Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko may soon be fired for his slow and incompetent handling of the pandemic and replaced by Denis Protsenko, the doctor at the hospital Vladimir Putin visited in March and apparently was impressed by (ura.news/articles/1036280642).

            Whatever happens among officials, the pandemic continues. Today, 6248 new cases of infection were officially recorded, bringing the cumulative total to 739,947, as were 175 more deaths from the virus, upping the official mortality count to 11,614 (t.me/COVID2019_official/1036).

            But ever fewer doctors and ordinary Russians accept these figures as accurate, and the Mediazone news agency says that there have been at least 21,231 deaths recorded by officials, reported to Moscow, but not acknowledged in the government’s public reports so far (zona.media/chronicle/krnjl).

            The big pandemic story of the day as far as the Russian regime was concerned involved a supposed breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against the coronavirus. Officials said the Russian one would work against “all types” of Sars-type illnesses of which the current virus is one (dailystorm.ru/news/vakcina-budet-protiv-vseh-vidov-sars-cov-2).

            Medical specialists said the new vaccine has completed its first trials, admitting that there were certain side effects, as yet unspecified, among some of the test subjects but not specifying how effective the vaccine in fact was as a guard against infection, the key question for most involved (svoboda.org/a/30725768.html).

            While the all-Russia figures for infections and deaths from the pandemic continued to drift downward, largely because of improvements in Moscow, the numbers of these in many cases shot up, not as part of a second wave but because the infections arrived later and have not been fought as vigorously, officials suggest (mbk-news.appspot.com/suzhet/dogonyayut-moskvu/).

            Thus, there were both openings and closings. International travel became easier with Russia lifting the requirement for a medical certificate from those coming from abroad or a two-week isolation requirement on those without one (asiarussia.ru/news/24806/ and publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202007130028?index=2&rangeSize=1).

            Moscow announced it would soon lift air and rail restrictions on travel to and from Belarus (t.me/rian_ru/45529), and eight countries, including Turkey and Egypt, announced they were ready to open their borders to Russian visitors (tourism.interfax.ru/ru/news/articles/71892/). But Chechnya closed its borders to all outsiders (tass.ru/obschestvo/8964653).

In the Altay, the number of new spikes in coronavirus cases has grown so large that officials there have lashed out at the population, blaming it for not following self-protection measures and thus allowing the pandemic to spread (meduza.io/feature/2020/07/14/v-altayskom-krae-v-neskolko-raz-vyrosla-zabolevaemost-koronavirusom-vlasti-vinyat-samih-zhiteley-vrachi-manipulyatsiyu-statistikoy-i-vecherinki-v-gorah).

And elsewhere in Russia, there is growing resistance to self-isolation regimes, distance learning and being forced to return to work (ura.news/news/1052440807, sibreal.org/a/30726526.html and vedomosti.ru/economics/articles/2020/07/14/834580-rossiyane-hotyat-rezhe-ezdit-na-rabotu).

As far as the economic impact of all this is concerned, the share of employers who say they are planning to lay off workers rose from 20 percent in April to 45 percent at the end of May, an increase that suggests the recession is deepening and that more unemployment is ahead (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/78183).

That and cutbacks in production have left the country’s financial system in increasingly dire straits. According to Aleksey Kudrin, head of the Accounting Chamber, the country’s financial structures now rank 120^th among the countries the world in terms of stability (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/78181).