As they intubate patients, doctors and nurses in the Western Cape hear “regrets being expressed” by those same patients who chose not to be vaccinated and are now fighting for their lives.
The provincial health minister, Dr Nomafrench Mbombo, who was a clinician for a long time before she became a politician, is gobsmacked by non-expert opinions undermining vaccine efforts in the province.
She said on Thursday: “In all my career previously as a healthcare worker and clinician, then as an educator and a researcher, and now as a politician, I have never seen a disease that has so many people becoming not only opinionated, but also believing that they’re experts.”
She said she “shares the frustration of healthcare workers who’re the ones being affected by vaccine hesitancy not just around the province, but the country as a whole”.
Comparing the current crisis with previous epidemics such as HIV, she said back then people “valued information they got from medical and healthcare experts”.
She added: “Healthcare services are our ministry’s core business, but health is everyone’s business, and we are not saying we should have a monopoly over information, but when people spread fake news they are undermining what is in the public interest.”
People are ignoring what healthcare workers are seeing every day, said Mbombo.
“If you don’t believe us, come and see for yourself — you will find 3,400 beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, many of whom chose not to get the vaccine. If you don’t understand 17,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the province, come to our mass facility centre in Tygerberg and see those 32 bodies that are there each day,” she added.
Mbombo said in December alone 45 health workers died in the Western Cape.
In the past month, now that vaccines are having their effect, there have only been 21 deaths “and the majority of those are in people who were not vaccinated”.
The flipside of stamping out hesitancy is increasing access.
The province, according to Mbombo, partnered with GrandWest Casino and Entertainment World to assist factory workers to get jabs, while other “non-health” sites were also being used to attract young people.
On September 1 “we will be at a club in Khayelitsha offering vaccines to young people who are normally patrons at that club by night”, she said.
Other pop-ups include a student residence at the University of Cape Town (UCT), various taxi ranks and church youth group meeting places.
Provincial head of health Dr Keith Cloete said healthcare workers at the coal face were not just dealing with statistics, but real people whose faces they had come to know in ICU.
Cloete, who has calmly delivered a digital press conference every week since the pandemic began, has had enough of those who “callously and irresponsibly [influence] people to not get vaccinated”.
“Our health workers are the ones having to contact those families to say your loved one did not survive,” he said, “and this is what our young doctors, nurses and experienced specialists have been going through for more than 18 months now.”
He said they were under “tremendous pressure every single day” and that “more and more they are treating people who are not vaccinated”.
This makes it “very hard for that doctor or nurse to be treating someone with severe disease who had the opportunity to be vaccinated, but did not take it. They can hear the stories of regret just before they get intubated, and that is the destruction of a life.”
“Health workers feel betrayed by that person and by those who are callously and irresponsibly influencing people not to get vaccinated,” he said.
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