Russians Upset Moscow Sending More Vaccine Abroad than It is to Regions at Home

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 5 – For profit financial and political, Moscow has been sending massive numbers of doses of its coronavirus vaccine abroad with 600,000 having gone to Argentina already and about two million promised to Iran, to give only two examples, at a time when it has yet to send large numbers to Russians in the regions.

            In Russia itself, commentators note, Moscow has distributed only 10,000 doses to Leningrad Oblast and even fewer to places far from the center. Not surprisingly, many Russians are upset by this imbalance and believe that the Russian vaccine should go to Russians before it goes to anyone else (svpressa.ru/health/article/289216/).

            Today, Russian officials registered 16,688 new cases of infection and 522 new deaths from the coronavirus (t.me/COVID2019_official/2445). Moscow said cases under medical observation have fallen 30 percent in the last three weeks (regnum.ru/news/3183713.html) but the pandemic continued to be a problem in many places (regnum.ru/news/society/3182472.html).

            Even in Moscow which has seen sharp declines in the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths over the last month, city authorities said the situation was far from resolved and that it is still too early to lift restrictions on mass measures, although that may be as much a political decision as a medical one (echo.msk.ru/news/2785610-echo.html).

            As of now, just over one percent of the Russian population has been inoculated (vedomosti.ru/management/articles/2021/02/04/856747-rossiiskie-provodyat), but medical experts said they expect to have given shots to 60 percent of Russians by the middle of this year (regnum.ru/news/3183094.html).

            That may or may not happen as a new Rambler Group poll finds that only about 40 percent of the Russian population is prepared to get the shots, far below what officials say is necessary to achieve herd immunity and end the pandemic (regnum.ru/news/3182917.html).

            Moscow celebrated praise of its vaccine from Western experts and announced that they expect it to spread from Hungary to other EU countries (kommersant.ru/doc/4681071?from=main_2 and regnum.ru/news/3183521.html). They also said that Russian researchers are coming up with a new vaccine for the elderly (kp.ru/daily/27235/4362833/).

            On the economic front, experts acknowledged that the malls Russians have come to rely on are in terrible economic trouble but insisted that few of them are going to close down despite the economic crisis (regnum.ru/news/3183843.html). But experts also said that Russian government projections of a recovery in the second quarter of this year are overly optimistic (regnum.ru/news/3183759.html).

            Meanwhile, in other pandemic-related developments in Russia today,

·         Demand for the vaccine may rise in Muslim areas now that Islamic leaders have accepted that it conforms to Muslim dietary rules and the Saudis are requiring evidence of the shots from anyone who seeks to go on the haj (capost.media/news/obshchestvo/musulmane-rf-priznali-vaktsinu-sputnik-v-khalyalnoy/ and regnum.ru/news/3183196.html).

·         And a young Mari singer has won a musical competition with a song about fighting the pandemic (mariuver.com/2021/02/05/pobediteli-idalykyse-muro/).