Chechnya Posts a Totally Made Up Vaccination Rate

Russia’s overall vaccination rate is 32 percent. Russia’s adult vaccination rate is 41 percent. Chechnya meanwhile claims its adult vaccination rate is 70 percent:

Chechnya fulfills 87% of coronavirus vaccination plan

GROZNY, October 3. / TASS /. More than 650 thousand residents of the Chechen Republic were vaccinated against coronavirus, the immunization plan was fulfilled by 87%. In total, 757,594 people need to be vaccinated to form herd immunity in the region, Aset Murtazalieva, chief epidemiologist of the regional health ministry, told TASS on Sunday.

“The pace of vaccination in the Chechen Republic has been stepped up. Over the entire period, 659,403 people have already been vaccinated, which is 87% of the plan. As everyone knows, now to achieve population immunity, 80% of the population must be vaccinated. This figure for us is 757,594 of the entire adult population of the region. [Ie, they claim to have vaccinated 0.87 of the 0.8 of adult population = 0.696.] Among persons over 60 years of age, 92,992 people were vaccinated, this is 67.7%, “Murtazalieva said.

There is no way in hell the semi-tribal highlanders of Chechnya have twice the vaccination rate of Russians.

Of course, there is also no way that more than 90 percent of eligible Chechens vote in each election with over 90 percent of the vote going to United Russia, yet that is what the Republic’s election commission reports time after time.

The nature of Russia’s system is such that the center signals what it wants to see, and the regional authorities downstream rush to make that happen. Failure could get you noticed as could success. The impetus is strong enough that soon fudging the numbers comes into play, and once everyone is doing it you’d be foolish not to do it yourself. (Not to mention you would look singularly bad.)

It is in this sort of system that in 2018 the center *publicly* accused the regions of having rigged their health data for years. After the center in 2012 proclaimed a war on cardiovascular disease deaths involving such disease fell every year — just as deaths of other causes and unexplained causes rose by the exact same amount.

So yeah, you could fudge your numbers as everyone does, or you could do like Chechnya and just make them up completely. When Kremlin signaled it would like to see a high vaccination rate the slightly more European Moscow responded by experimenting with a short-lived vaccine passport and mandating it for hospitality workers, whereas the rather less stuck up Chechnya — where Kadyrov supposedly just won 99.7 percent of the vote —simply made up a number and sent it back to the center. They’ve been accepting trash numbers from Chechnya for the elections for years so it’s not like it’s a hi-risk move. At this point, no one expects anything but utter mind-boggling trash from Chechnya and nothing but leniency from the center.