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72 Opinion
bne July 2021
Bankers, barbers, physicists, taxi drivers, students and pensioners have told me they are all steadfastly refusing to take a COVID-19 vaccine. Even many of my friends in Moscow and my wife’s parents, who suffered with the virus, refuse to take Sputnik V or any of the other Russian vaccines.
Eyebrows were raised by a headline in the Irish Independent on May 24 that one in ten people aged 25-34 years old are going to refuse the vaccine. Meanwhile in Russia, a Levada poll two weeks prior indicated that just 12% of Russians aged 18-24 years of age were ready to be vaccinated.
“Some friends assume they have contracted coronavirus and have antibodies – even though they have never been tested for either”
Some friends assume they have contracted coronavirus and have antibodies – even though they have never been tested for either. Others claim Sputnik V isn’t safe and they want to wait for Russia’s Chumakov vaccine to become available or until they get their hands on Pfizer. Several acquaintances, who really should know better, cited links between 5G and the virus and a theory that the vaccine contains a microchip, which harvests biometric data.
Unlike in many other countries, conspiracy theorists are not
confined to the margins of the media. In fact, they are afforded the biggest platforms to air their dangerous nonsense.
Turn on your TV last year and you could have heard the celebrated Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov on state- controlled Rossia-24 channel accusing the Microsoft founder Bill Gates of seeking to insert microchips into people under the guise of coronavirus vaccines in a bid to control humanity.
Mikhalkov told his audience that the technology for this grandiose plan is being patented under the number 666 – the number of the Antichrist. A similar conspiracy about Gates being behind the pandemic as an effort to prepare the world for mass micro-chipping, was also aired on Russia’s main Perviy Kanal station on its Man and Law programme.
Social media is even worse. TV doctor Elena Malysheva has popped up on her Instagram account to advise her many followers to eat oysters to prevent coronavirus.
Malysheva, who hosts Zdorovyiye (Health) on Perviy Kanal, also claimed in January that it was not necessary to take
a vaccine if you have suffered from COVID.
President Vladimir Putin has been conspicuously absent from any publicity drive to convince the nation to get vaccinated. The Kremlin announced in March that Putin, who normally craves a good publicity shot, announced in late March that Putin had received its first dose but the circumstances and the details of which vaccine he took were shrouded in secrecy.
Moscow, Russia. Billboard: "I was vaccinated against Covid-19. I advise you too." Denis Protsenko. Chief physician of Kommunarka hospital. Photo: Shutterstock.
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