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Why the Kremlin Has Failed Vaccination Campaign?
Russia was the first country, which declared the creation of a COVID-19 vaccine, but today only 23% of population have been fully vaccinated. There are fewer people in Russia who want to be vaccinated than in countries with low COVID awareness such as Nigeria, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso. What steps is the government taking to establish trust to Russian vaccines in the context of popular mistrust to this government itself? How effective are these methods according to a new study by the Levada Center? What does the vaccination campaign have in common with Russia auto industry and dissenting vote?
Russian government responded to the development of western vaccine with a discrediting campaign that had to present Sputnik V in the good light. Russian media presented foreign vaccines as low effective and argued for frequent occurrence of side effects and high post-vaccination death rates. However, Russian propaganda has driven itself into a trap, and criticism of foreign vaccines has resulted in mistrust, first of all, to Sputnik V. If one tells Russians that Mercedes-Benz is unsafe, people will think Lada will simply explode once you start it.
Levada Center conducted a study to assess the readiness of Russians to be vaccinated. It revealed that 54% of Russians don't want to be vaccinated and only 25% are willing to get a vaccine. 33% fear of possible side effects, 20% conceive that information about the vaccine is incomplete, 16% are sure that there is no reason for vaccination. The study also revealed a correlation between reluctance to vaccinate and attitude to the government. 31% of Vladimir Putin supporters trust the vaccination campaign and 45% aren't ready to get their shots. 71% of people who oppose Putin are not ready to vaccinate and only 14% are ready to get vaccinated.
Apart from the lack of information and mistrust to the government, people oppose vaccination because there are no foreign vaccines available. In response to popular discontent that they are being deprived of choice, the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov replied:

"We have four national vaccines. Isn't it a choice? "

(S)election without an alternative is familiar to Russians and their response to vaccination campaign resembles electoral patterns. Russia has only one safe and efficient vaccine with significant international data from San Marino, Argentina, Hungary and Serbia: Sputnik V. However, Russians prefer to get vaccinated with understudied vaccine - CoviVac - developed by the Chumakov Institute. There is no sufficient data about this vaccine and its developers openly states that they have only preliminary conclusions about it. However, people are lining up to participate in the CoviVac trial instead of getting tested and effective Sputnik V.
The Moscovites stand in long lines to participate in CoviVac trial. The vaccine is still not produced on mass scale, which causes deficit.
Political scientist Mikhail Vinogradov explains the irrational choice of Russians as a replication of their voting patterns. Vinogradov assumes that CoviVac plays the role of the line "against all" in the voting ballots of the 2000s. CoviVac developers have not used aggressive state-backed propaganda and once they announced the first positive results, even people who believe in chipping and the fact that smokers do not get covid sick started to discuss them. CoviVac simply became a form of "protest vaccination."
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