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Moscow police have launched dozens of criminal probes to crack down on fake inoculation certificates, as vaccine scepticism remains stubbornly high in Russia despite soaring infection rates.
AFP reports that Russia’s black market for falsified vaccine certificates is flourishing, largely fuelled by a mistrust of the homegrown Sputnik vaccine.
The underground trade has taken hold even as a third wave of the virus sweeps across the country, breaking national records for virus-related deaths in recent weeks. Senior Moscow police official Pavel Milovanov said 32 cases had been opened into the falsification of vaccine certificates, according to Russian news agencies.
Authorities launched a vaccination campaign in December, but so far only 18.5 million of 146 million Russians – or 13% of the population – have been fully vaccinated. Recent polling suggests around half of Russians do not intend to get inoculated.
The theory that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab was considered a debunked conspiracy theory, the British Medical Journal reports, but some experts are revisiting it amid calls for a new, more thorough investigation.
It comes after the Lancet published a new letter this week supporting calls for further study of the pandemic’s roots after intense criticism over a statement in February 2020 that described the possibility of Covid-19 originating from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab as a conspiracy theory, without disclosing that a key author’s non-profit steered US funding to the lab.
Related: In hunt for Covid’s origin, new studies point away from lab leak theory
Read the original article at The Guardian