How Russia failed to contain COVID
When you can’t safely criticize the government, no one trusts it. And if no one trusts it, no one will get vaccinated.
In theory, an authoritarian state like Russia should have an easier time fighting the COVID-19 pandemic than a liberal democracy. Conspiracy theorists are spreading misinformation about vaccines on the internet? Shut ‘em down. People are reluctant to get vaccinated at all? Force them to do it. Nothing to it, right?
That’s why I wrote, “in theory.” In practice, accordingly to a piece in Foreign Policy, it turns out that Russia’s response to COVID-19, at home and abroad, has completely collapsed:
As I write this, Russia is firmly in the grip of the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every day, there are about 22,000 reported new infections—twice as many as during the peak of the first wave in May 2020—and more than 600 deaths. The new Delta variant of the virus, which Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin says is responsible for 90 per cent of new infections in the Russian capital, has caught Russia almost completely unawares. Despite having access to the brain power and resources of one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, Russian authorities have repeatedly squandered almost every chance to beat the pandemic. Their massive, bloated propaganda apparatus failed to do the one job it was designed for: Get the message out. Instead, the pandemic has exacerbated the crisis of trust between the Russian government and citizens. Now, the campaign for parliamentary elections in September could make fighting the pandemic even harder, since the ruling United Russia party may be even more reluctant to impose unpopular measures such as lockdowns.
Russian independent observers and journalists—including me and my colleagues at Meduza—already knew something was terribly off with Russia’s handling of the pandemic in late spring of 2020. We had looked at the numbers and recognized that COVID-19 deaths were being underreported in many regions of Russia. According to the official statistics at the time, tens of thousands of Russians were dying in 2020 of a mysterious pneumonia epidemic unrelated to COVID-19. This was hardly plausible. The more likely explanation: Russian regional authorities were writing off the majority of COVID-19 cases as “community-acquired pneumonia.”
The author of this piece, Russian investigative journalist Alexey Kovalev (not the guy who played for the Pittsburgh Penguins, I presume) doesn’t think the Russian government is actively suppressing news about the pandemic, so much as regional authorities are downplaying it so Putin won’t get mad:
There is no evidence of a cover-up ordered from the top. More likely, regional governorates were simply being discreet to avoid being the bearer of bad news to the Kremlin. Underreporting COVID-19 cases in the early stages of the pandemic plausibly made many Russians question the existence of the virus or lulled them into a false sense of security, although there is no poll data to back this up. What’s certain is that by November 2020, according to independent polling institute Levada, the majority of Russians did not trust their government’s COVID-19 figures: 33 percent thought them too low, while 28 percent believed they were exaggerated.
And now hardly anyone in Russia trusts anything the government says. The effort to promote Sputnik V around the world - a Russian vaccine which Kovalev actually took, and believes to be effective - isn’t going so well, either:
…less than one month after Argentina became the first foreign country to adopt Sputnik V in December 2020, it had more people vaccinated with the Russian vaccine than all of Russia outside of Moscow, according to Russian independent news site Mediazona. Even now, the Argentinian Ministry of Health’s reports are the most extensive source of information about Sputnik V’s safety. And they confirm what the Russian government has failed to convey to its own citizens: Russia’s primary vaccine is indeed safe and effective.
Today, however, Argentina is unhappy about its arrangement with Russia: As of late June, it has only received a fraction of the number of doses that had been promised to be delivered by March. So instead of Russia’s international image getting a boost, Moscow’s attempt at vaccine diplomacy has turned into another flop. According to Bloomberg, as of mid-June, Russia has only delivered 17 million doses of almost 900 million promised to its clients around the world. Argentina and Mexico are already turning to other vaccine producers. And on June 29, Guatemala also embarrassed Russia by demanding a refund on its advance payment for an undelivered batch of Sputnik V. But instead of addressing the logistical issues obstructing deliveries—problems that were visible from early on—Sputnik V distributor Russian Direct Investment Fund and its CEO Kirill Dmitriev instead complained about the international media’s alleged bias against the Russian vaccine.
We hear a lot about how the United States and some other Western democracies are becoming “low-trust” societies, in which people have lost faith in their governments and major institutions. You can argue endlessly about the degree to which the institutions and the people themselves are to blame, but it’s a real concern.
Authoritarian states are low-trust societies by definition. When anyone who speaks out will be punished, you keep your head down and your mouth shut. More importantly, you know that everyone around you is doing the same thing. In that case, how can you really believe anything you’re being told?
Of course, at some point, everyone decides they don’t want to keep their heads down anymore. And this happens:
Look at that face when the crowd turns on him. Even after the Berlin Wall had fallen, he really didn’t expect this.
Ceausescu’s Romania had an all-encompassing surveillance state, and his minions must have known what was coming. And none of them wanted to be the guy who told the leader.
Meanwhile, you won’t see MSNBC hosts blatantly falling for Russian propaganda.
Chinese propaganda, on the other hand…
It’s not the comic itself that offends me. Well, the artwork offends me. One billion people and they couldn’t find a cartoonist whose work doesn’t look like a Tony Zaret meme?
I’m not even that offended by a totalitarian dictatorship posting it. As I’ve written before, just because the critique comes from an anti-American, anti-democratic regime doesn’t make it automatically wrong.
What bothers me in this case is that Hayes took the bait and appears to accept this as an example of what the people of China really think about his own country. Maybe the average Chinese person really does believe the United States is a charnel house in which you will be shot as soon as you get off the plane. (Heck, if social media is any indication, many Canadians believe this.)
But if someone in China took issue with this portrayal, could he say so without nuking his social credit score?
Speaking of absolute power, if I were a King, this is the kind of thing I’d want to do:
King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands traveled in style for a three-day state visit to Germany as the co-pilot of the ‘Dutch Air Force One.’ The sovereign was at the aircraft’s controls during its journey from The Hague to Berlin Brandenburg Airport on July 5th. King Willem-Alexander is a keen aviator and secretly flew commercial flights for Dutch airline KLM for 21 years.
[…]
Many knew of King Willem-Alexander’s passion for piloting, as he was frequently pictured at the controls of his own plane during state visits. However, it came as a surprise when the public discovered the King had been moonlighting as a commercial pilot for KLM. In 2017, it became public knowledge that King Willem-Alexander had flown commercially for KLM for 21 years.
The King has claimed that, were he not part of the royal family, he would dedicate himself to commercial piloting. While he was difficult to recognize in his KLM uniform and pilot’s cap, some passengers reportedly recognized his voice during announcements onboard. He obtained his piloting credentials in the 1980s and underwent retraining to operate Boeing 737s after KLM retired the Fokker 70.
(I actually don’t know how to fly a plane, but if I’m the King, who’s gonna stop me?)