Late in October, SA joined a select club of countries who are offering Covid-19 vaccines to children as young as 12 years of age.
It’s a move that will not only boost the country's immunisation campaign but may go a long way to offering protection to families, teachers and limiting disruptions to schools as they go into the year-end examinations period.
Earlier in October, it was reported that school-going children were the main driver of a surge in infections in the UK. That caused disruptions not just in schools but also for businesses whose workers were often forced to self isolate as well, contributing to the well-publicised supply-chain constraints that have hit the economy.
SA’s opening up its vaccination programme to younger people comes at a time when the country has a problem that it couldn’t have anticipated even six months ago. Instead of a shortage of jabs, the government is now grappling with flagging demand, so much so that it looks increasingly unlikely that SA will achieve its target of vaccinating 70% of adults by December.
Local companies are increasingly looking at vaccine mandates, something in which the big US banks led on months ago, making it compulsory for employees who return to the office to have jabs. Discovery led the way among JSE-listed companies, saying it would have such a policy in place as of 2022.
In a country that seems to have both high levels of vaccine hesitancy and access challenges, a debate has arisen between the seemingly conflicting principles of public safety, and the rights of those who prefer not to take the vaccine to have their privacy and freedom of choice respected.
The move by Business Unity SA (Busa) to apply to the courts to get legal clarity on the matter is a welcome one. Trade unionists, whom one would expect to be in favour of workplace vaccine mandates, have opposed them as being unconstitutional. One would have imagined that they would be more concerned about occupational safety, not to mention SA suffering another wave of infections that would lead to yet more job-destroying restrictions and lockdowns.
PSG CEO Piet Mouton has suggested that any future lockdowns should be applicable only to those who refuse to get vaccinated, through it’s unclear how that could be achieved. First prize is clearly to get as many people as possible jabbed. But there is also a role for mandates to deal with working people and those who want to use public spaces for leisure activities such as watching sport or going to bars.
People who dismiss science and argue that vaccines are likely to have long-term effects that haven’t yet been identified are not likely to change their minds any time soon. Requiring them to get jabbed before travelling, returning to the office, or enjoying a live concert is going to be far more effective.
It’s ironic, of course, that SA has been one of the champions of vaccine equity, with President Cyril Ramaphosa pushing the fight for the temporary waiver of intellectual property rights to facilitate production elsewhere.
Rich countries rightly have come under criticism for hoarding vaccines, with coverage of up to 90% for the nations that make up the UK. The US, EU and China have vaccinated between 57% and 75% of their population so far. That's a lot of people getting jabs in the richest countries on earth for people to sustain an argument that Africans are being used as guinea pigs for untested vaccines.
Covax, an international vaccine financing scheme set up by the World Health Organisation, has been branded a failure, with the Financial Times reporting that just 3% of people in low-income countries have had a single dose, while the International Monetary Fund has spoken of a great “vaccine divide” that threatens the global economy.
It was public pressure that moved SA’s government away from a reliance on Covax and other collective schemes. This means SA, one of the lucky emerging markets with so much supply it can offer jabs to children already, need not suffer from the great “vaccine divide”.
If it does, it will all be self-inflicted.
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