MOSCOW—All of Yekaterina Mazalova’s friends tried to talk her out of joining a clinical trial for Sputnik V, the Russian coronavirus vaccine. “Don’t become a rabbit for experiments,” her best friend told her.
Over the summer, Russia claimed to be the first country in the world to approve a vaccine, before trials had even begun. As assurance, President Vladimir Putin said his daughter took the shot. But the early missteps on the vaccine’s announcement and rollout only added to what is now a looming problem: 45 percent of Russians are skeptical of Sputnik V.
The public fear over the vaccine falls into several categories, experts say. Some see it as poorly researched and succumb to conspiracy theories. “Many don’t believe that authorities publish all the data or tell people the entire truth,” Alexander Ivanov, a research associate at Moscow’s Institute of Molecular Biology, said of the low public trust in an interview with The Daily Beast. “There are blank spots and questions for the research—but considering the spreading pandemic, 1.6 million victims, it makes sense to go forward with the mass vaccination, as soon as possible.”
