MOSCOW, June 30. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that any speculation about a conspiracy between world leaders over the coronavirus pandemic is absolute nonsense.
"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," he said during his annual question-and-answer session.
Speaking about anti-vaxxers, the president noted that there are quite a lot of such people. "There have always been and there always are people who think that any vaccination is unnecessary. And there are a lot of such people. Vaccine ‘refuseniks’. There are quite a lot of them both in our country and abroad. What is happening to them? What are the specialists saying? When large-scale vaccination is in full swing against other infections, the situation seems to be normal, and people tend to think there is no necessity to get vaccinated. What for? Next to nobody falls ill. Once the scale is reduced to a certain threshold, bang! and outbreaks spring as if from nowhere. And then everybody is rushing to get vaccinated," Putin noted.
He stressed that vaccination is a reasonable choice and warned people against listening to those, who know nothing about the matter and only spread rumors, and called for listening to the views of specialists.