The other day, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, meeting with Moscow activists, announced the high cost of vaccination in Europe against the background of the freeness of the same service in Russia. We checked whether his words were true.

A video recording of a fragment of the meeting appeared on the morning of May 21 in personal blog capital mayor. Telling activists in northeast Moscow about the pace of vaccination in the city, Sobyanin said:

“We get sick, we continue to get sick. People continue to die. And yet they don’t want to get vaccinated. Moreover, if there, in Europe, vaccination costs €1,500–2,000, but here it’s free. Not only do we vaccinate in clinics and in shopping centers, now we vaccinate in parks. Now we pay pensioners another 1,000 rubles so that they can use that 1,000 to buy goods in stores, just to get vaccinated. There is no one. Well, relatively no one..."

You can understand the Moscow mayor - the pace of vaccination in the capital and throughout the country as a whole is far from ideal. On graphics You can see how the gap between the Russian indicator and the European average is growing every week. However, what about the price of vaccinations? IN Moscow, as in all Russia, you can actually get vaccinated against coronavirus for free. As for Europe, the EU countries, of course, do not get the vaccine for nothing: they pay $2.15 (about €1.76) for each dose of Oxford - AstraZeneca, $8.50 (€7) for Johnson & Johnson, $18 (€14.8) for Moderna, and the price of the Pfizer - BioNTech vaccine for the region grew up in recent months from €12 to €19.5. The Russian Sputnik V and the Chinese Sinopharm remain relatively exotic for European countries. got by, for example, Hungary at €8.2 and €30.8 per dose, respectively.

However, this does not apply to the population, since in all European countries governments have decided to provide vaccinations free of charge. Among these, all 27 member states of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland, France, Croatia, Czech Republic, Sweden, Estonia), who left him recently United Kingdom, as well as other countries: Albania, Andorra, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vatican, Iceland, partially recognized Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Montenegro And Switzerland.

Moreover, in San Marino, having vaccinated the entire population, the authorities went further and announced the start vaccine tourism — a foreigner can come and receive a full dose of Russian Sputnik V. True, it’s no longer free, but for €50. In some countries, vaccination is covered by compulsory health insurance. It should be noted that in the case of coronavirus this is not a one-time action - usually Various seasonal vaccinations in Europe are available free of charge to many categories of the population.

Thus, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin made a mistake in his speech: Europeans can get vaccinated against coronavirus in their country for free, and not at all for a lot of money.