KYIV — Ukraine’s pandemic figures are scary: skyrocketing infections, record deaths and among the lowest vaccine rates in Europe. So officials decided to get scary themselves with an advertising campaign aimed at young people: If you’re unvaccinated, you may die.
Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight
“Every day, there’s a new record in deaths,” a voice-over intones in one advertising spot being shown on nearly 30 local television channels. Over images of young people partying, working out and engaged in everyday activities, different voices echo ideas among young people about their invincibility. “Everything’s fine with my immune system.” “I’m still too young.” “It’ll pass over me.”
But those shots are spliced together with images of young people being put on oxygen and rushed into intensive care. A final shot shows a coffin being lifted.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
“You can fool yourself, but not covid,” the final message says.
The ad, and others like it, mark a noticeable escalation in the government’s struggle to get the upper hand on the pandemic. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has now promised to accelerate the pace of vaccinations, after months of slower approach focused on rolling out the vaccination drive and delivering basic information on the range of vaccines in Ukraine, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Sinovac.
Britain approves world’s first oral covid-19 treatment
“I ask everyone to switch off your social networks and turn on your brains,” Zelensky said in recent comments to reporters. “We must get vaccinated. It’s the only solution.”
Story continues below advertisement
Ukraine is experiencing its worst coronavirus wave so far, and one of the deadliest in Europe. Daily numbers among the population of around 40 million regularly exceed 20,000 infections and 700 deaths — well beyond the previous major outbreak this spring, where the figures were around 15,000 cases and 500 deaths.
Advertisement
The World Health Organization has placed Ukraine at No. 3 in daily deaths, after the United States and Russia, and in the top 10 in daily cases. On Thursday, the WHO said Europe is again a pandemic hotspot with a more than 50 percent jump in coronavirus cases in the past month.
For those countries that are currently the “most affected,” Johns Hopkins University says that Ukraine is the eighth highest in terms of deaths per 100,000 people in the population.
Story continues below advertisement
Hospitals in parts of the country are reporting a shortage of beds, and there have been difficulties in keeping up with oxygen demand. On Oct. 25, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moved Ukraine to Level 4, its highest risk category.
Ukraine public health officials warn that the situation may further deteriorate with deaths predicted to increase to more than 1,000 per day in the coming weeks.
Inside Russia’s ‘fourth wave’: Record deaths, deep frustration and plenty of blame
Central to officials’ efforts is an all-out push to boost vaccination rates.
Between 20-25 percent of the population have both jabs of a vaccine, which are free and easily accessible. At the same time, officials report that well over 90 percent of those hospitalized are unvaccinated.
One reason the vaccination rates are so low: widespread anti-vaccine narratives and disinformation campaigns, many of which officials claim are being pushed by Russia.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Russian authorities deny that they are fomenting instability in Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials insist this is part of Moscow’s multi-vectored campaign to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty — what Ukraine calls a “hybrid war” — which has witnessed Russia’s unrecognized annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014 and support of an armed separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Recent messages that Ukrainian officials suspect have Russian links include conspiracy theories that the coronavirus is spread through 5G technology or by billionaire Bill Gates, that the vaccines will cause mutations or that Ukraine’s response is proof that it’s a failed state.
In March, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in response to U.S. allegations that Moscow was spreading pandemic-related disinformation worldwide, said the claims were “absurd, have no basis in fact.”
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
“Russia has never participated and does not intend to participate in such campaigns against other vaccines,” he said. (Russia developed its own vaccines, led by Sputnik V.)
Caught between politics and the pandemic, some countries ban rivals’ vaccines
Ukraine’s information campaigns in the spring and summer focused largely on getting out the word that the vaccines — which reached Ukraine relatively late — were available, and where and how they could be accessed.
Svitlana Kisilova, head of Ukraine’s Covid-19 Vaccination Communication Center, said she and her team realized that they weren’t connecting with certain audiences. They began to shift their message in September.
“The anti-vaccine messages are more emotional and very blunt,” said Kisilova, whose group helps coordinate the government’s public outreach.
Story continues below advertisement
“We looked at our research and understood that what we were doing wasn’t working for certain audiences,” she added. “We’ve stopped being nice.”
Advertisement
Ukrainians’ resistance to vaccines has a long history. Many view any official directive with suspicion, after decades of governmental corruption and mismanagement. There is also a movement against more established vaccines, such as for measles and polio, that predates the pandemic.
On Wednesday, health officials told the BBC Ukrainian service that five children had been diagnosed with polio in southwestern Ukraine.
At the same time, however, the anti-vaccine narratives were taking root. Opinion polls showed a sharp drop over the summer in the number of people saying they were ready to receive the shots, from more than 70 percent to fewer than 50 percent.
Story continues below advertisement
“The reasons [for the drop] were many — lack of trust, fear of after effects,” said Andrii Sukharyna, a political analyst at Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kyiv, which carried out the second poll.
“But there were also more hidden reasons, and these to a great extent were connected to Russian propaganda.”
Isabelle Khurshudyan in Moscow contributed to this report.
How to navigate coronavirus restrictions across Europe
Am I eligible for a booster shot?
In Russia, experts challenge official pandemic figures. They refused to be silenced.