I was one of the lucky people to be Pfizered at 1 Discovery Place this week. It was an experience to remember, in the best way. The vaccine centre Discovery has put in place at its vast but currently almost empty Sandton headquarters is well designed and well resourced, with a warm and welcoming fleet of queue marshals and vaccinators who were efficient and expert.
It was an exhilarating experience - and, it seems, not just for those being vaccinated. Says Discovery's Ron Whelan: "Our teams have actually loved it, getting to know the members. As a health or life insurer you never really get to see the customers and it's quite hard to portray this level of kindness from a call centre."
Not that Discovery's own members are the only ones served by the centre, which caters for any medical scheme member allocated to it by the government's EVDS system. On Wednesday it switched swiftly to EVDS-registered walk-ins, insured or uninsured, when EVDS failed to allocate it anyone. Word of the walk-ins went round rapidly and long queues formed even before Discovery could send out the formal communication it had intended. But it all ran smoothly. Whelan says the only regret was that the centre couldn't get to everyone in the queue. By Thursday it was back to EVDS bookings.
Discovery was one of several sites that opened to walk-ins, at least temporarily this week, prompting a mad dash by over-60s. Dis-Chem in Midrand took walk-ins for a couple of days, so too did public sector facilities at Chris Hani Baragwanath, and Hillbrow and Alexandra clinics, whether because of EVDS teething troubles or EVDS appointment no-shows.
It was an encouraging sign of how agile the leadership of private and public sector facilities can be, given half a chance - one that inspired confidence that SA's vaccine rollout could work better than expected. Within four days this week, 117,000 people got their vaccines, a contrast with the three months it took to roll out 480,000 Sisonke trial doses to health workers (which only reached that number in its last few days).
Of course, the dash for walk-ins was not good for equity, favouring the digitally connected and networked over-60s, in suburbs and townships, over rural folk and those without smartphones or transport, or the ability to take off from work at a moment's notice.
It prompted concerns about vaccines reaching the most vulnerable. Against this, GroundUp and former TAC activist Nathan Geffen argued that SA's priority must be to get the vaccine into as many willing arms as possible, as fast as possible, and that we will have a better chance if the health authorities resist micro-managing the process.
One source of inequity that will hopefully be addressed soon is the funding of vaccinations for the uninsured in private facilities. This is being increased as business works with the government to ramp up national capacity, at pharmacy chains, private clinics, mass sites and mines, with other employers getting shots not only into the arms of workers but also their families and communities.
There will be the capacity, private and public, for SA to achieve its vaccine targets. It needs to do so, not just to stop people dying and allowing the economy to reopen, but because if we don't make sure of using the 61-million doses we have contracted to buy, they will go elsewhere.
SA is unusual, if not unique, in that the private sector is financing part of the national rollout, with medical aids paying for their members. It's an excellent investment for them, even if one might ask whether private providers should be paying for something that is for the public good.
In practical terms, though, it complicates the payment process because there is no mechanism for private providers to charge the state the way they do medical aids. For now, that largely limits publicly funded over-60s to public hospitals and clinics, rather than enabling poorer people, and SA at large, to take advantage of facilities the private sector is gearing up. A solution is for SA's public-private rollout partnership to work as equitably and effectively as possible
Meanwhile, crushing though it may be to be categorised as "the elderly", I am cheered to have had my Pfizer.
• Joffe is contributing editor
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