The DA is giving the government seven days to provide details and information of its vaccine rollout strategy, failing which the opposition party will approach the courts.
DA leader John Steenhuisen said President Cyril Ramaphosa had made “vague promises” about vaccine deliveries.
“Even if these orders did exist, we have no idea which companies they’re supposed to be coming from, when they’ll get here, how much we’re paying for them, whether they’re single or multidose vaccines, who will get them first and how they will be stored and distributed,” he said.
“If government can’t tell us any of these things, we have no reason to believe that they have indeed secured these orders.”
The government has been under fire for failing to procure sufficient vaccines as a matter of urgency, especially while other countries have started to vaccinate their populations. Covax is SA’s biggest confirmed source for vaccines.
More than 30-million doses have so far been promised in direct deals with vaccine manufacturers and agreements with multilateral agencies.
In his address to the nation last week, Ramaphosa said SA had secured more than 20-million doses, though he did not give details of where they would come from and when they would be delivered.
He said SA would receive its vaccines through the Covax facility, which is securing vaccines for middle- and low-income countries, as well as through the AU’s vaccine initiative. He said SA was also directly engaging with vaccine manufacturers.
It was also announced earlier in January that the state had secured 1.5-million doses of the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for healthcare workers from the Serum Institute of India, which will arrive this month and in February.
Ramaphosa also said last week that SA’s vaccines would be coming from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and portions from Johnson & Johnson and Moderna.
Steenhuisen said the DA’s lawyers had written to Ramaphosa on Monday setting out how the government’s strategy did not meet the constitutional requirements for a comprehensive vaccine rollout programme, in that it violated several constitutional provisions, such as the right to access to healthcare services.
It has given the president seven days to reply, explaining why in his view the government has not infringed on those constitutional provisions.
The party has also asked Ramaphosa, for the sake of transparency, to set out details of the government's negotiations with vaccine suppliers, and to include the dates and minutes of all meetings.
The opposition party also wants a breakdown of the budget for the acquisition and the rollout of the vaccines, covering public funds, private funds, donor funds and loans.
In a briefing following his address, Steenhuisen said, there had been no accountability and that parliament was “sitting on its hands” because of the Disaster Management Act, which is the framework used to impose SA’s national lockdown under a state of disaster.
He said there was no oversight mechanism in terms of the Act, and it was very difficult to get information out of government.
The DA also took issue with the Treasury’ consideration to raise taxes as one of several possible mechanisms to fund the vaccination drive.
DA finance spokesperson Geordin Hill-Lewis said the proposal was “callous” and showed insensitivity to the financial suffering of many families at this time.
“The total cost of a comprehensive vaccine rollout is estimated at just over R15bn at most. This amount would be comfortably affordable for the government, were it to reprioritise wasteful programmes and cancel wasteful bailouts. The admission that tax hikes must be considered now is an admission that the government did no forward planning for the vaccine rollout last year,” he said.
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