The ACDP’s legal bid to stop the government offering Covid-19 vaccination shots to teenagers is misguided and misplaced, much like its campaign against mandatory workplace shots and vaccine passports. Not only does its high court challenge pose a time-consuming distraction for a health department battling to inoculate vulnerable adults in greater numbers ahead of a likely fourth wave of infections, but it poses a very real threat to any attempt to normalise schooling.
Children are at significantly lower risk of severe illness and hospitalisation for Covid-19 than adults, yet in many respects they have borne the brunt of the restrictions imposed by the government in its attempts to curb transmission and limit the burden on the healthcare system. They have faced school closures, bans on organised sport and leisure activities, and even under the current level 1 restrictions the majority are still missing out on vital face-to-face interaction with their teachers because the social-distancing requirements imposed by the government mean most schools are still on a rotational timetable.
The educational losses have been immense. School attendance plunged to its lowest level in more than two decades, with younger children losing close to a full year of learning during the pandemic, according to the National Income Dynamics Study — Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey. Those missed opportunities dealt some of SA’s most vulnerable children a blow from which they will never recover, hobbling their prospects of obtaining a decent education and charting a path out of poverty.
Vaccination can’t fix a year of lost schooling or persuade a disheartened teenager to return to class. But it can help normalise schooling, put an end to rotational learning and allow teenagers to make the best use of the resources their schools have to offer. It also offers them greater scope to safely participate in sport and leisure activities, which are an equally important part of their development.
It is worth bearing in mind that SA is anything but a trailblazer on the vaccination front. Bureaucratic bungling, unexpected variants and production delays meant SA only began offering shots to the general public in mid-May, and initially only in a very limited manner to the elderly. As of November 8, 32% of the adult population was fully vaccinated with either a single Johnson & Johnson shot or the double-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and more than 218,000 teenagers had received a single Pfizer shot — far lower numbers than in many other middle-income countries.
The only saving grace of being a vaccine laggard is that the experts guiding the government’s vaccination choices have both real-world and clinical trial data on which to base their decisions. That is not to say these are easy decisions to make, since the administration of vaccines requires healthcare resources that are already stretched thin. But the UK, US, France, Italy, Israel, Spain and many more nations that began vaccinating children ahead of SA have provided ample evidence that vaccinations are safe and effective.
The ACDP has cast the government’s recent decision to open the Covid-19 vaccination programme to children aged 12 years and older as a malign attempt to use them as human shields to protect adults. It argues in court papers that the vaccines will not reduce transmission, and pose a greater risk to children than Covid-19. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Despite teenagers not being as vulnerable to Covid-19 as adults, they nevertheless face the very real risk of hospitalisation, death, inflammatory conditions and long-term complications from the disease. There is clear scientific evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of infection, and that Covid-19 carries a greater risk of myocarditis than the single dose of the Pfizer vaccine on offer to SA’s teens.
That risk-benefit ratio is less compelling for a second shot for older teenage boys, which is the reason only a single shot is being recommended in SA for now. The fact that the government’s advisers have recommended teens receive just one Pfizer shot should be good evidence that they have weighed up the pros and cons.
It is time now for the ACDP to stop tilting at windmills and let the government get on with the vital business of vaccinating the nation, children and all.
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