The Kremlin has positioned itself in sharp words against people who refuse a corona vaccination. Those who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and actively try to get others to refuse the vaccination are “dangerous lunatics,” said Dimitri Peskow, the press spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a special broadcast of his own on Sunday about Covid-19 on Russian television.
Peskow appeared on TV with other government officials to promote the vaccination campaign. When asked by the moderator Nailya Asker-Zade what he thought of anti-vaccination campaigners, Peskow said literally: “Dangerously lunatic. That’s two words. Just one word is not enough. “Andrei Shkoda, the chief physician of a clinic in Moscow, said on the program that the anti-vaccination authorities showed a” militant ignorance “. Another head doctor from Moscow, Sergey Tsarenko, described people who doubt the vaccination as “idiots”. The country’s Russian health minister, Mikhail Muraschko, called vaccinators “unreasonable”. Anna Popowa, the head of the Russian health authority Rospotrebnadzor, stated that those who opposed the vaccination were “driven by fear”.
The willingness to vaccinate in Russia is rather moderate: According to Muraschko, only 62 percent of Russians over 60 years of age have received their first vaccination. This means that Russia is far behind its self-imposed goal of a vaccination rate of 80 percent with complete vaccination protection. With Sputnik V, Russia has developed its own vaccine, which has also been produced as a nasal spray for some time. President Putin had tried the spray himself in public.
The Russian state broadcaster RT reports prominently about the Kremlin’s statements in its English-language edition. In the German edition of RT Deutsch, the harsh words against the vaccination opponents were not yet published by Monday noon. The German edition reports rather benevolently about the scene of vaccination critics and corona protests. Recently, the broadcaster asked with regard to the testimony of a ZDF blogger who called anti-vaccination opponents “appendix” whether this choice of words was “Nazi language”.