Russia says 2 million inoculated as campaign drags

MOSCOW: Russia has vaccinated more than two million people with its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, one of its developers said Wednesday, two months after the country began administering the jab to the public.

Deputy director of the Gamaleya research institute that developed the vaccine, Denis Logunov, was cited by the Interfax news agency as saying 2.2 million people had received the first dose of the two-dose jab, while 1.7 million people had gotten both.

The total is a far cry from the nearly 69 million people -- from a population of 150 million -- that Russia aims to inoculate before removing social distancing and other epidemiological measures.

But life has all but returned to normal, with bars and restaurants in Moscow operating as usual and companies no longer mandated to have staff work from home.

It's a stark contrast to much of Europe, where lockdowns were reimposed ahead of the winter holidays as a second wave of infections surged and new virus variants sprouted up from Britain to Brazil and South Africa.

Russia wasn't spared a second wave, but its authorities pinned hopes on ending the outbreak and buttressing the struggling economy with its vaccine rollout.

Moscow registered Sputnik V in August ahead of clinical trials and began administering it to the public in December before peer-reviewed results were available.

The rushed rollout was vindicated when leading medical journal The Lancet last week published results showing the vaccine -- named after the Soviet-era satellite -- was both safe and 91.6 percent effective.

But Russia is now struggling to get its population to take the jab, with just 38 percent of Russians according to several recent surveys saying they will get inoculated against the coronavirus.

For his part, President Vladimir Putin has not yet been vaccinated.

On Wednesday, Russia also officially surpassed four million coronavirus infections, days after the country dramatically revised upwards its fatality rate, cementing its place as one of the world's worst-hit nations.

A government tally showed infections had reached 4,012,710, which is the fourth-highest rate globally after the United States, India and Brazil.

Moscow has come under fire for its official virus statistics and the government's stated death toll of 78,134 in particular has been undermined by recent mortality data.

Figures published by statistics agency Rosstat on Monday showed more than 162,000 virus-related deaths last year, more than double the number reported by the government's task force so far.

Russia has frequently been criticised for downplaying the impact of the pandemic and only counting fatalities where coronavirus was found to be the primary cause of death after an autopsy.