Health minister Zweli Mkhize is on special leave. I doubt he will quickly return to politics but even if he was unaware of the R150m transferred by the department of health to the PR company owned by friends (possible), and even if he didn’t know they had passed on a few of those shekels to his son (possible), the whole affair makes him look incompetent and dishonest.
And even though Mkhize conducted himself well at the outset of the coronavirus epidemic, he was caught napping on the acquisition of vaccines and is easily the person most responsible for the fact that we have an extremely poor rollout under way. It will not get worse without him.
In his place, President Cyril Ramaphosa has appointed a trusted favourite — tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane. It is his way of staying close to the inaction and also signalling that the Mkhize thing may be temporary (the “signal” being that she is not a medical doctor). The ANC clings to the absurdity that the health minister must be a doctor. By that logic the justice minister should be a lawyer and the transport minister should have a driver’s licence.
Clearly our vaccine rollout, like the country, is in dire trouble. For people who have had their shot it may not feel that way, but they are the slimmest of minorities. Each day exposes the hubris of a state that allocated to itself the right to decide what vaccines to buy, who should get them and when.
I watched the health department deputy director-general in charge of the rollout, Nicholas Crisp, on eNCA the other day. When he complained there was a shortage of vaccines, his interviewer asked if perhaps we had not put all our eggs into one basket.
Sneering and defensive, Crisp called the questioner naive. Did he not even know we had two baskets? It wasn’t anyone’s fault (and certainly not Crisp’s) that the 2-million Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines ready to roll at the Aspen plant in Gqeberha were being held up because the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has issues with the US plant where the ingredients used by Aspen were first produced. And anyway, he said, we are talking to other suppliers. He meant the Russians and the Chinese.
Crisp has two problems. Actually, three, but a compulsion to evade is too deep for me. His problems are, first, that there may in fact not be a shortage of vaccines, even with the J&J problem, at all. It may just be that Crisp can’t cope.
Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, both experienced researchers, wrote in GroundUp on Monday that, by last Sunday, about 500,000 people (health workers) had had the J&J single-dose vaccine. And nearly 800,000 more had had a first shot of the Pfizer vaccine, which requires two injections.
But, they note, by last Sunday “2.5-million doses had been flown into the country” and even if you allow for wastage where vaccinators don’t get the full six vaccines out of each vial, it means there were still 780,000 doses of vaccine unused in the system.
Crisp’s system, that is. Either he doesn’t know where they are or they don’t exist, in which case the government has been lying about how many doses it is flying in.
Last week the Western Cape health department arrived at the clinic in the village where I live. They vaccinated about 70 people on the first day and, I presume, another 70 the next day. The sister in charge told people who missed out they would come to the clinic every Wednesday and Thursday. This Wednesday they did not come back.
Crisp’s second problem is that we really did cock up our vaccine procurement. He wasn’t in the room when it happened, apparently. But we did put all our eggs in one basket. It’s a figure of speech, Nicholas. The fact is the government took a huge gamble on J&J, but those vaccines at Aspen were put in their vials months ago and the life of the vaccines is now becoming a factor. Crisp was certain on TV that the FDA approval would come through any moment. After all, “we” have spoken directly to them.
Like that matters. The FDA takes some of the biggest medical bets on the face of the earth and they’re used to people trying to rush them. A few million vials of a possibly contaminated vaccine in whaddatheycallportelizabethnow mean nothing, zilch, nada to it. We gave away a million doses of AstraZeneca, after all. The Americans don’t think we’re short. Ramaphosa will have to appeal directly to US President Joe Biden at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall this weekend.
When we woke up in December to the fact that we didn’t have a vaccine programme we should have scattered our orders as widely as possible. We should also have ordered from Moderna, which made us an offer that would be coming good around now. We turned down Novavax. Both of those vaccines are effective against our dominant strain.
Instead we got stars in our eyes. “Let’s find an African solution for an African problem,” said the table thumpers at the health department. So they chose J&J. It’s a single shot, the vials will be filled here and you can basically keep it cool in a river. Perfect. We’re so clever.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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