Calculating without "fake": media investigation showed the real level of vaccination in Russia

The online publication Important Stories (recognized as a foreign agent on the territory of the Russian Federation - editor's note), together with Novaya Gazeta, studied the data in order to figure out how many fake vaccination certificates the Russians purchased.

As a result of the investigation, it turned out that NOT ONE Russian agency keeps statistics on how many patients with a fake certificate ended up in the hospital or how many QR-codes were sold by fraudsters detained by the police.

At the same time, according to journalists, from March 2020 to November 2021, at least 472 criminal cases were initiated for forging certificates throughout Russia. In the total volume of cases of forgery of documents, this is not much: in 2020 alone, more than 20,000 such cases were investigated in the country.

This state of affairs is not harmless at all, since it seriously affects the overall pandemic situation in the country, which is already recognized as the most severe in the world.

At the same time, some Russians who have bought a vaccination certificate are catching up and looking for ways to actually get vaccinated. According to Forbes, they turn to private clinics because they cannot be admitted to the state clinics - a record of their vaccination has already been entered into the system. But not only for this reason: in order to get vaccinated in a state institution, you must first file an application with a request to cancel information about fake vaccination, and this threatens the patient with initiation against a criminal case.

Analyst of the Watching COVID-19 community Viktor Kabano, who studies vaccination data in our country, is sure that the volume of fake vaccination certificates in the country, of course, is not 80%, as Academician Gunzburg says, because it is impossible to verify. But this volume is still in the millions. According to his estimates, "forgeries are definitely more than half a million, and less than 10 million".

All this, in turn, greatly reduces the already low level of real vaccination, which is already insufficient to protect against Omicron:

“Today, 68.6 million people have been fully vaccinated in Russia, which is 46.9% of the population. From this we must subtract about eight million people who have not been revaccinated, and those who bought a certificate. You can subtract five million, you can three - it doesn’t matter, we get about 30-40% of those vaccinated, the expert says. “This level didn’t even work with the old strains, and against the new it’s nothing”.

At the same time, journalists claim that the number of sites selling fake certificates has begun to grow again.