VACCINE SHOPPING: Vaccination centers have been set up at several shopping centers in Moscow. Here, people are queuing up to get vaccinated in the department store GUM on Friday.
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Russian authorities are taking drastic action to ensure that the population is vaccinated. In several regions, it is now mandatory for workers in several sectors to be vaccinated.
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The Russian authorities have aimed for 30 million of the country’s more than 142 million inhabitants to be fully vaccinated by mid-June. To achieve this, they have, as the USA, including the use of vaccine lotteries and advertising campaigns.
But according to the news agency AP they are far from the target: 16.7 million people, around 11 percent of the population, are now fully vaccinated. 20.7 million people, around 14 percent of the population, have received one vaccine dose.
Infection in Russia has increased sharply during June. While around 9,000 new cases of infection were reported a day in early June, more than 20,000 cases were reported on Friday. Almost half of them are in the areas around the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The number of hospital admissions has also increased, he writes Moscow Times. On Wednesday, 130,000 Russians were admitted with covid-19, and another 519,000 are followed up by a doctor.
Authorities in several regions are now trying to whip instead of carrots to get people vaccinated: In at least 14 areas, according to the AP, vaccination is now mandatory for employees in several sectors. This will apply to people who work in government offices, in grocery stores, with health or education, and employees at restaurants, gyms and beauty salons.
Authorities in the Moscow metropolitan area have also asked companies to lay off employees who do not comply with the requirement, and by 15 July they also threaten to suspend operations at companies where less than 60 percent of employees have received at least one vaccine dose.
Tatiana Moskalkova, the Commissioner for Human Rights, says to AP that unvaccinated people have reported discrimination in the workplace, and some have also said that they have been threatened with dismissal or that they will not be paid bonuses.
Dimitrij Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said that the authorities still believe that vaccination is voluntary: those who do not want a vaccine can apply for another job.
Other regions have also taken action: The hotels in Krasnodar, where the holiday destination Sochi is located, will only accept vaccinated guests from 1 August, writes Moscow Times.
President Vladimir Putin has previously said that Russia will not make vaccination mandatory.
“They have pushed themselves into a corner, and now they have no choice,” Judy Twigg, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, told the Associated Press.
She specializes in global health.
– They have hyped this vaccine so much that people do not trust it. Then they did several things that were obviously meant to give a message that the authorities had everything under control, that the pandemic was not a “big deal”. And now they are not surprising in this situation, where a low vaccination rate has given an opening for the Delta variant.
With its Sputnik vaccine, Russia was the first country in the world to approve a corona vaccine.
Read about the production of the Sputnik vaccine here: The secret vaccine race
According to the independent polling institute Levada Center, however, as many as 60 percent of the population in Russia are reluctant to be vaccinated.
– I often hear from people who respond to surveys that they do not want to take it, that they are afraid and so on. But if restrictions are introduced, and they are required to travel, to get services from the state or at work, then they will say yes, says the leader of the center, sociologist Denis Volkov to AP.
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