Coronavirus: Russian lawmakers call for investigation into western newspapers doubting official death toll

Moscow is sticking to an implausibly low death count despite an official caseload suggesting the country’s epidemic is the world’s second-worst

Russian lawmakers have stepped up a campaign against western news organisations that have reported on fears the country’s Covid-19 death toll may be significantly higher than acknowledged.

The move by a parliamentary committee to refer both the Financial Times and New York Times to the state prosecutor on Friday underlines a growing sensitivity among authorities to any hint they may be suppressing mortality rates.

Vasily Piskarev, head of the State Duma’s “foreign interference” parliamentary sub-committee, said three opposition-leaning Russian media resources would also be scrutinised for their decision to report on the reports.

“We analysed the English-language publications, and identified a series of Russian language resources distributing the bogus New York Times and Financial Times stories to a Russian audience,” Mr Piskarev said.

According to official caseload data, Russia‘s coronavirus epidemic is now comfortably the second-worst in the world. On Monday, a further 10,598 diagnoses were recorded, making a total of 262,843. But at the same time Russia has reported just 2,418 deaths, reflecting a case mortality rate less than 1 per cent.

Read more

As The Independent reported last week, those figures are scarcely credible. For one thing, faulty coronavirus tests mean the true case number is significantly higher. For another, authorities are clearly not reporting all Covid-19 deaths. In the words of a respiratory consultant who spoke to this website: “If you have someone with Covid-19 who happens to die from cardiac arrest because of the stress, the death will almost certainly be put down to the heart.”

At the weekend, The Moscow Times reached the same conclusion using excess mortality figures for April. These suggested deaths in Moscow were running at a rate of approximately 1,800 more than the 10-year average.

The official Covid-19 death count in the capital was just 642, which, the online publication surmised, meant authorities were registering barely three in 10 of all coronavirus fatalities.

The New York Times and Financial Times followed up these findings with their own articles suggesting the same. The Financial Times identified an unexplained spike in deaths in St Petersburg and concluded that the number of deaths was underreported by 70 per cent nationwide.

Moscow city officials themselves indirectly supported these calculations, admitting 60 per cent of fatalities with a secondary coronavirus diagnosis were not being classified as Covid-19.

Over 20 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, local media has been subjected to increasing censorship. Up until now, authorities have not made serious moves against foreign newspapers, but that may be changing.

On Thursday, Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, angrily rejected the NYT and FT articles as “disinformation”, and demanded retractions. In later comments, she appeared to link the papers’ accreditation in Russia with the publication of such a retraction.

A day later, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov distanced himself from such comments.

“I haven’t heard anything about it and I haven’t discussed it with Maria Zakharova,” he said. “I think that neither she nor I should advance such ideas.”