Non-Russian Pro-Russians Must Acknowledge Putin’s COVID & Vaxx Stances
Those abroad who regard themselves as pro-Russian and especially anyone who admires President Putin must acknowledge his COVID and vaccine stances even if they still disagree with them since it’s counterproductive to his international reputation to remain delusional by imagining that he’s against the prevailing scientific consensus on these issues.
Many folks who regard themselves as Non-Russian Pro-Russians (NRPR) are apparently under the illusion that President Putin is against the prevailing scientific consensus on COVID-19 and vaccines. One need only to frequent pro-Russian and -Putin groups on social media to see how many people hold this false belief. It’s unclear exactly how they came to arrive at these conclusions considering the fact that the Russian leader has always been very upfront about his views towards these issues, but it might very well be due to the fake news that proliferates like wildfire about him across the Alt-Media Community (AMC). There are regrettably some people who profit from spreading these false narratives by generating ad revenue for their sites through clickbait and/or soliciting donations from naive but well-intended followers.
In any case, President Putin once again attempted to put to rest all the speculation about his views during Wednesday’s live Q&A session with the Russian people. Lasting nearly four hours, as is typical for these yearly events, the head of state naturally spoke about a wide range of issues. One of those that he spent the most time on and which started off the discussion was COVID-19. Not only did President Putin implore his people to get vaccinated as soon as possible, but he also very strongly condemned all those who question the official narrative about the virus and vaccines. In his own words as reported by TASS, “I have heard lots of things: that there is nothing, that no epidemic exists. Sometimes I hear what people, adult, educated people on the face of it, say. I don’t know why they say that <…> it is a conspiracy of the leaders of all countries. Do they understand what is going on in the world, how many contradictions the present-day world is living with? They just up and conspired – it is absolute nonsense.”
It also deserves mentioning that head of the monitoring group tracking actions taken to interfere in Russia’s sovereign affairs in the period of preparing and holding the Russian legislative elections Vladimir Dzhabarov publicly speculated earlier in the week that the anti-vaxx narratives spreading throughout Russian society might be the work of Western agents in order to meddle in the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections. Taken together with President Putin’s latest remarks, it’s very clear that the Russian government is unwaveringly opposed to anyone who attempts to dissuade its people from taking the pandemic seriously and getting vaccinated. NRPRs have the right to disagree with this stance, but they mustn’t any longer imagine that the Russian leader is “secretly on their side”. He’s not, at all. In fact, he’s zealously against the anti-vaxxers in those ranks and regards them as threats to Russia’s epidemiological security.
I wrote back in January how “President Putin’s Davos Speech Defined The World War C Era”, which analyzed the Russian leader’s address to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in which he’s been proudly participating for years per his own admission during that address. Nevertheless, President Putin has his own vision for the post-COVID world order, particularly in terms of its socio-economic structure, which is why NRPRs should read what he has to say before reactively imagining that he’s now “in on it too” just because he doesn’t share their particular interpretation of events. Just like he’s always been throughout the entirety of his career, he’s actually in the middle of both extremes, thus making him the ultimate moderate. He supports the prevailing scientific consensus on COVID-19 and vaccines, and he’s also a believer in the seemingly inevitable socio-economic transformation that many describe as the “Great Reset”/”Fourth Industrial Revolution” (GR/4IR), but he conceptualizes the latter in a different way than many of his fellow WEF peers.
The main takeaway of this piece is that NRPRs can still support Russia and especially President Putin in general while disagreeing with the country and its leader on whatever issues it may be that they feel the strongest about, including COVID-19 and vaccines. What they shouldn’t do, however, is continue to spread false claims and innuendo about him supposedly sharing their views about those two topics. That only inadvertently feeds into the Western Mainstream Media information warfare campaign which deceitfully alleges that Russia is responsible for spreading so-called disinformation about the virus and the many experimental treatments for it. Moscow has never been behind any such campaigns, but when average Westerners see NRPRs unwittingly adding credence to those claims by publicly imagining that President Putin shares their skeptical views about COVID-19 and vaccines, they actually do a major disservice to the very same things that they say they support.
