How Russia is losing the fight against vaccine skepticism – By Daniel Van Boom (CNET) / Aug 6 2021
Russia was the first country to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine. A year later, less than a fifth of Russians are fully vaccinated — and the daily death toll is peaking.
Ulyana was getting a haircut when it happened. As she sat in a St. Petersburg beauty salon with her hairdresser and several other customers, the topic of vaccines came up. One woman declared she wasn’t going to be the Russian government’s lab rat, and others murmured in agreement. Ulyana told her hairdresser, Katya, that she’d gotten the Sputnik-V vaccine and felt fine. Katya was shocked.
The hairdresser got out her scissors and slowly moved them toward Ulyana’s shoulders. She believed Ulyana had a microchip in her shoulder.
“I was speechless,” said Ulyana, a 31-year-old consultant. “She explained to me that in the videos she had seen on the internet, vaccinated people could stick metal objects like coins to their bodies in the place of injection because the ‘vaccine chip’ draws them.”
The hairdresser showed Ulyana the Instagram video she’d seen, as well as a Telegram group she subscribed to. The group’s members, numbering in the thousands, spoke of how the government would be able to use the vaccine to implant a microchip that would give it the power to control someone “like a video game character.”
CONTINUE > https://www.cnet.com/features/how-russia-is-losing-the-fight-against-vaccine-skepticism/
