The ANC national executive is meeting this weekend and one of the things they’ll be talking about is increasing taxes to pay for the coronavirus vaccines we desperately need. It is hard to imagine more explosive evidence of the fact that our government has only now begun to think about buying Sars-Cov-2 vaccines, but also that it had never even thought about how to pay for them.
A tax increase isn’t going to happen. The vaccines are cheap and I will pay for mine and 100 other people who can’t afford one if that helps. So would thousands of South Africans — individuals and businesses.
Because of the ANC’s fatal lack of self-esteem and self-confidence, we are negotiating only with the Serum Institute of India. It will provide us with its version of the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca and Oxford university, when it’s ready. The government has decided only it can do these complex negotiations and its default has been to phone the Indians rather than the Americans and British, who are actually creating the vaccines.
Low self-esteem, wrote a famous surgeon, is a little like driving through life with your handbrake on. I suffer from it as well so it was with some trepidation this week that I set out to save the country. I called Moderna, in Boston, one of the two US Sars-Cov-2 vaccine producers. They are a small and new company, in no way the “Big Pharma” the Left so love to hate. They put their existence at risk to make their vaccine.
I spoke to Patrick Bergstedt, Moderna’s senior vice-president for commercial vaccines. That would make him the actual person you call to place an order. Bergstedt took my unexpected phone call well, clearly a nice person. I had read up earlier that he was poached by the upstart Moderna from pharma giant Merck in 2020.
I wanted to find out how difficult it was to order vaccines, given that our government seems to be struggling so. I asked him: “If you got a call today from the SA government wanting to order vaccines, would you talk to them?” He said: “Of course I would.”
I then asked: “If we placed an order for, say, 40-million doses today, when could we expect them?” He said: “By the middle of 2021.”
So it’s just like any business. Easy. You don’t barter. You order, pay a deposit, get a delivery date and pay upon dispatch. Surely someone in the state knows how to do this?
What they perhaps wouldn’t know is that Bergstedt is South African. Grew up in Durban, schooled at Glenwood. In 1995, he was SA marketer of the year, while he worked for Sanofi. Atop the accounts he follows on Twitter are the Springboks. Like the best of us who leave to make careers abroad, he comes home often. And no-one from this country’s government has called him about the vaccine he sells.
It is hard to adequately express the scale of state failure on vaccines. Tito Mboweni passed two budgets during the crisis in 2020 and never made any provision for them. And he’s supposed to be the genius in cabinet. Now, suddenly, they’re talking about a tax increase?
Who knows what is really going on? Health minister Zweli Mkhize says the department of health’s procurement officials are on the case, working the phones. Heaven help us.
Imagine the forms you have to fill in, the permissions you have to get. Now they’ll have to wait for the ANC national executive. I swear this country couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag any more.
We have no idea what’s coming. There’ll be more surges, more virus variants. Lockdowns, which in their turn trigger subsequent surges, will be a feature of our lives for years.
If you’re anywhere in the liquor chain — making wine or brewing beer, transport, retail, glassmaking, bottling, restaurants — consider giving up and doing something else. President Cyril Ramaphosa is unconcerned with your plight. He’ll claim he is busy saving lives but he isn’t doing that either, as the vaccine debacle clearly demonstrates. He is asleep on the job.
There’ll be little political consequence, the only thing he would respond to. With local elections in 2021, if you’re him looking out at the battlefield, what is there to worry about? The DA is trying to right itself with a new leader in John Steenhuisen, who has yet to find his leader voice. The Freedom Front is off on a hopeless tangent about Cape independence, and the EFF is a mess.
Internally, Ramaphosa’s nemesis, ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, goes on trial in Bloemfontein in less than a month on 21 charges of corruption and fraud. He will have to leave his job and if, as is likely, he is found guilty, he’ll spend years in the legal wilderness trying to avoid jail.
Like many countries, we started this health crisis better than we have come to be handling it. Only private sector involvement in vaccine procurement and distribution can really help now. I promised Bergstedt I’d guard his phone number with my life but I would be very tempted to give it to Adrian Gore (and only him) if he approves.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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