03:50
@tchrist Two different Russian agencies in fact report wildly different figures.
There is a huge underreporting of cases in Russia.
Oppositional statisticians and analysts come up with "true" figures once a month or so, and then start wrangling and kicking among themselves on whose "true" figures are "truer".
Even the daily statistics on the number of vaccinations performed is so haphazard, that a volunteer project is working to collate all the different figures from all regions and come up with a kind of a general daily vaccination stats for the whole country.
Looks like the system created by Putin from about 2011 finally started bringing its rotten fruit, and yes-men came to predominate the upper tiers of power. Thus authorities are more afraid of Putin's "vertical of power" than they are afraid to bungle their tasks.
This is evidenced by the fact that the EpiVakCorona vaccine, most certainly a dud, continues to be produced and distributed to regions, and no official stands up to oppose this.
An Israeli statistician came up with this estimate, according to which Russia is among the countries with the highest excess deaths/100 thousand.
But still in terms of undercount we are keeping strong, we did not even make it into the top list, unlike Belarus.
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EpiVacCorona (Russian: ЭпиВакКорона, tr. EpiVakKorona) is a peptide-based vaccine against COVID-19 developed by the VECTOR center of Virology. It consists of three chemically synthesized peptides (short fragments of a viral spike protein) that are conjugated to a large carrier protein. This protein is a fusion product of a viral nucleocapsid protein and a bacterial MBP protein. The third phase of a clinical trial, which should show whether the vaccine is able to protect people from COVID-19 or not, was launched in November 2020 with more than three thousand participants.The interim results of...
> At the start of the Phase III, trial participants and those vaccinated outside the trial began to form a community through the Telegram messenger network. On January 18, 2021, the members of the community turned to the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation with an open letter, in which they stated that the production of antibodies after vaccination among them is much lower than declared by vaccine developers.
After such a scandal, one would expect a number of officals lose their posts, and the vaccination campaign to be banned for this particular vaccine.
Nothing happened. It is regularly shipped to regions and is given to people.
> April 20, 2021 the study participants got a reply, with refusal of performing any additional verification antibody tests or investigation of severe COVID-19 cases among vaccinated individuals. The reply include the following text: "Considering that the listed immunobiological preparations (vaccines) for the prevention of COVID-19 are registered in the prescribed manner, their effectiveness and safety have been confirmed."
In Russia, such official answers are called otpiska (an official answer that is couched in the appropriate language, but fails to provide any answer and addresses some very different topic altogether).
You send an official complaint to the state, providing facts that show: this vaccine is a dud. You ask in your letter: what is happening? Halt this vaccine right now!
The reply comes: "the vaccine was admitted and registered. Thank you very much".
> Conventional commercially available antibody detection systems cannot reveal post vaccination antibodies after EpiVacCorona.[9][10][8][11] Therefore, vaccine developers have designed their own detection test system, and they were criticized for not revealing antigens in this system.
The company came up with its own "antibody detection" system that is a black box.