EDITORIAL | Julius, cut the rhetoric and point-scoring and put your people first

EFF leader Julius Malema this week encouraged the youth to get vaccinated against Covid-19, which is good, but he only went halfway in that he refused to say whether he had been vaccinated. His reason? He doesn’t want to be an “influencer of western vaccines”. He said getting vaccinated is a personal choice, which it is for now, but how can he, in good conscience, not throw his considerable influence behind the country’s effort to get as many people vaccinated as possible, as quickly as possible? The short answer to that question is politics, because he has long called for SA to import the Russian or Chinese or Cuban vaccine equivalents, well knowing we’re sourcing from US companies that developed them in record time.

He may have a point about SA’s reliance on the West, especially the US, and we may well reflect that SA potentially could benefit from more diverse sourcing, if that contributes to the economy and health goals we are trying to achieve. But before ideology, surely, must come the health and wellbeing of all South Africans, which is precisely what our vaccination programme is striving to promote. In this instance, at least, we have to be ideology-blind.

Therefore, Malema joins, even if unwittingly, the chorus of those hindering SA’s effort to move beyond this tragic chapter in our existence. As it is we were battling to move beyond global depression abroad and state capture at home before Covid-19 further compounded our problems. This chorus ranges from the vaccine-hesitant to the outright vaccine-refusers, from top doctors one trusted to know better, to lay people who insist they’re not yet satisfied with the research, but blithely do so without the handicaps of polio or measles they would have were it not for vaccines.

We are not alone in the problem of trying to defuse vaccine hesitancy. In the US, where President Joe Biden’s administration is having to fend off a tsunami of politically motivated denialism, even its former president, Donald Trump, was booed when he gingerly told a rally in Alabama, the US capital of anti-vaxxing sentiment, that getting vaccinated is a good idea and that he himself had been vaccinated. Interviewed on CNN after the rally, one supporter said Trump was lying about having had the vaccine, which suggests how deep-rooted the mistrust and suspicion are.

The evidence in favour of vaccination for cutting death and hospitalisation rates is conclusive; so too is the growing evidence that suggests the unvaccinated are contributing to the persistence of Covid-19 and driving the Delta variant, which ultimately puts everyone at risk, especially with the realisation that even a double jab may not be enough and that boosters will be needed.

But before ideology, surely, must come the health and wellbeing of all South Africans, which is precisely what our vaccination programme is striving to promote. In this instance, at least, we have to be ideology-blind.

For now, SA has held off on any move to make vaccines mandatory, though there is a move towards this drastic step in the US, where certain categories of workers are being told to vaccinate or ship out unless they have valid medical reasons. A recent negative test will not be enough and that will increasingly be the case, with a vaccination certificate necessary to travel abroad or attend mass public events.

Making vaccines mandatory for all but those with compelling religious or medical reasons is where SA should be going, according to Salim Abdool Karim, former chair of the medical advisory council on the virus, who is a World Health Organisation (WHO) science council member.

“So even one unvaccinated person poses that risk to the whole world. If that’s the case, and it’s a very strong one, then it can’t be simply a matter of personal choice. It has to be that for the public good there is a vaccine mandate,” he told eNCA recently. It’s not a matter of going door to door and compelling people; rather it’s about targeting certain sectors and limiting the unvaccinated from access to public spaces.

Perhaps we will not get to that point in SA and, if Malema’s attitude is anything to go by, the issue has the potential for a big political fallout that will hamper the war on the disease should the government ever have to take this drastic step.

Recently, and with the opening of the vaccine programme to those 18 years or older, there seems to be a bit more optimism about our vaccine programme, which was in the doldrums two weeks ago, but seems to have picked up.

For example, Gauteng premier David Makhura says the province administered 70,000 vaccines a day on Friday and on Tuesday this week, and he credits pop-up vaccine centres and taking the vaccine to the unvaccinated as being responsible for the encouraging uptick. And we’ve passed the 11-million mark for total vaccinations, while the registration figures for the over-18s have been encouraging too.

It would be unfortunate if we get to a situation where the only way to get past Covid-19 is mandatory vaccinations. It doesn’t fit well with the idea of a free people living in a democratic state. For that reason, and because we all desperately want things to return to normal, people with the influence Malema has should not be hedging their bets and trying to score ideological points. The more of us who say yes to the vaccine and get it, the quicker we can put this thing behind us, without having sacrificed the freedom to choose. Let’s do it while the choice is still ours to make.