Is Putin part of the club?

A review of Russia's response to COVID

There is quite a lot of debate over whether or not Russia, under President Putin, is part of the globalist agenda or is actually a bulwark against the insanity that has gripped the Collective West.  The obvious conclusion is that he is not part of any agreement with the Collective West which has; provided over EUR 90 billion in military aid to Ukraine, has targeted the wealth of Russia’s oligarchy and whose politicians have even called for President Putin’s assassination¹.  Dismissing those facts in order to present a proposition that the West and Russia are actually aligned in some way is a very tall order.

I waded in to this topic since I lived in Russia for over a decade and speak Russian, which means I read and listen to Russian sources of information, although I have to circumvent Western censorship by using VPNs.  Some of the claims of collusion range from the silly, for example a picture of President Putin shaking hands with Henry Kissinger, to the slightly more credible relating to the roll-out of CBDC in Russia.

The one area I want to focus on here is the response to COVID, where Russia appears to have fallen in line with the global agenda, however appearances can be deceptive, and the truth is somewhat messier.

Half-baked coercion

There is one very interesting feature of COVID vaccine take-up which is that the further east you travel in Europe, roughly speaking the lower the vaccination rate.  A credible explanation is that this trend is due to the fact that citizens in the former Soviet Bloc have good reason not to trust their governments since they have experienced totalitarianism within living memory.  This may well turn out to be a key advantage in resisting the ongoing Great Reset.

The fact that Russia has the lowest level of vaccination of any major country is a testament to the fact that State coercion was half-baked and that the Russian population had a high degree of scepticism towards the vaccine.

Russian opinion polls by Levada Centre regularly showed that around 55% of respondents did not intend to take a COVID-19 vaccine and that barely changed in 2020 or 2021, despite propaganda efforts and coercive measures².

The coercion in Russia was half-baked because President Putin made it clear in May 2021 that introducing compulsory vaccination was “forbidden”.  However, in reality a number of regions started introducing various forms of compulsory vaccination.  The most significant of these was Moscow in June 2021 where the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, issued a decree requiring vaccination for some categories of front-line workers.  All other regions eventually followed suit.  In Russia, you then had a paradoxical situation where the President dismissed compulsory vaccination, which was then almost immediately implemented for some workers at the regional level.  Inside, Russia’s complex system though, the President’s statement would have carried a lot of weight and as you can see from the overall outcome, vaccine coercion did not work in practice.

In the United Kingdom (for example), compulsory vaccination was introduced by Parliament in July 2021 for care home workers and as we now know a gigantic programme of applied psychology was launched in order to get people to comply with Government diktat.  The coercion in the U.K. was intend to go further and to be extended into the NHS, which would almost certainly have led to the collapse of the NHS as a meaningful number of staff were expected to leave.  The level of vaccine compliance in the U.K. was much higher than in Russia driven by a combination of; trust in the government, the deliberate use of fear and coercive measures implemented by law.

In Russia there was also little, if any, censorship of vaccine sceptics.  The Official Representative on Questions of Human Rights, Tatyana Moskalovo, raised concerns about discrimination against the unvaccinated at the highest levels of government.  In addition, an important dissident, Maria Shukshena, achieved enormous social media traction with ¼ of a million Telegram followers built largely on her vocal opposition to vaccine coercion.  Again you can contrast this with the gleeful campaign of oppression launched against vaccine sceptics by the U.K. political and media “elite”.  Vaccine scepticism was expunged from social media by algorithms and by input provided by the State to Big Tech.  Only a few smaller parties (Heritage and ADF) took a lonely stand against the oppression in the U.K., with other parties and influencers happy to oppress the unvaccinated.

What was the COVID outcome?

Russia developed its own vaccine, Sputnik V, based on tried and tested adenovirus vectors and not on the mRNA technology.  The level of information about how effective the vaccine was is very limited compared with the mountain of studies that are available for the mRNA gene therapy products, which show effectiveness against infection rapidly falling to zero and some serious adverse reactions.

The good news for Russia is that excess deaths have been negative since around April 2022, even with the ongoing special military operation (SVO).  It is possible of course that death data is being manipulated in order to avoid people being able to back-calculate estimated SVO deaths, but based on official data there are negative excess deaths in 2023 whereas around 70% of the countries in the Akaralinsky World Mortality Dataset³ are showing excess deaths which are higher in 2022/23 than during the pandemic year of 2020.

This is though not the full picture, you may notice that Russia had almost no excess deaths in the pandemic of spring 2020 and sees a first wave only in the winter of 2020.  This peak is even exceeded by the post-vaccine roll out peak in winter 2021.  Overall then Russia performed very poorly despite the fact that excess deaths are currently negative.  This is more clearly visible from the cumulative excess deaths picture.  The recent reduction in cumulative excess deaths reflects the fact that excess deaths have been negative since around April 2022, by contrast the U.K. cumulative excess deaths picture is getting worse.  It is impossible to say why exactly the Russia outcome of 20% cumulative excess deaths from Jan 2020 to early 2024 is so bad, but this certainly does not suggest that Sputnik V was particularly effective. On the positive side, there is no sign of the long term harms and elevated mortality rates that are observed in much of the West.

Closing thoughts

Overall I believe that it is somewhat crazy to suggest that President Putin is affiliated with the Collective West, or Davos.  In fact, the Davos agenda of control by a small elite using new technologies was exposed and criticized by Mikhail Kovalchuk, the Head of Russia’s Kurchatov Institute, in a keynote speech in early 2021⁴.  Russia’s policies on many important topics are diametrically opposed to the position taken by the Collective West this covers; promotion of Russian history, incentives to have children, LGBT propaganda and many other issues. 

In terms of vaccine coercion, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and Russia’s very low level of vaccination compared to the West shows that the coercion was not particularly effective.  Paradoxically, vaccine sceptics achieved a lot more traction in Russia and were not censored in the same way as in the West.  At this stage in history a benign dictatorship with a sceptical public may fare better than a captured democracy with a docile public in a Great Reset scenario.

I plan to tackle the other reasons why Russia is not in any alliance with the globalists in the coming weeks.

Let me have your comments below (paying subscribers).

Thanks

Alex

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lindsey-graham-putin-take-this-guy-out/

2. https://www.levada.ru/2021/08/09/vaktsinatsiya/

3. GitHub - akarlinsky/world_mortality: World Mortality Dataset: international data on all-cause mortality.

4. https://x.com/ThinkingSlow1/status/1668706950622724096?s=20