“None.” That was the crisp response of SA’s well-known television judge in response to my late-night email question: “Is there anything in SA law that prevents mandatory vaccination?” So why don’t we simply make vaccines mandatory? Ethics perhaps. That something is legally permissible does not mean it is ethical — that measure of right and wrong in a society. A young democracy should be particularly conscious about forcing public policy on individuals, given we just had three centuries of racialised policies imposed on citizens for everything from where you could live to where you would be buried.
I suspect though, that the main reason for official hesitancy about mandates is the potential political fallout. The DA leader has already launched a pre-emptive strike: “We need to be careful when we start to talk about mandatory vaccination; I think it gets people’s backs up. I don’t think it’s constitutional either; there’s the right to bodily integrity, it’s enshrined in the constitution. Anybody who doesn’t want to be vaccinated, well, that’s their personal choice.” As already indicated, you can throw the constitutional argument in the dirt bin. And what is this nonsense about “bodily integrity”? Does that mean that when a parent takes their child for potentially life-saving vaccinations against chickenpox, mumps, measles, rubella and polio that they face a great moral quandary about “bodily integrity”? We really need to raise the level of debate about vaccinations.
There is only one way to return to some sense of normal on campuses and that is to get everyone vaccinated at pace.
“Personal choice” is another example of sloppy thinking when it comes to coronavirus infections and their potentially lethal consequences. Your choice not to take the vaccine can kill me. It is as simple as that. The same people who dutifully put on a seat belt, stop at a red robot and do not smoke on a plane are not exercising personal choice, they are mandated to act in their own interests and the interests of others. When, as a motorist, you treat a red robot as a choice issue, other people can die. It is a profoundly selfish act to wave around the banner of personal choice in the heat of a pandemic.
That is why I applaud some universities contemplating mandatory vaccinations for staff and students. Students are a particularly vulnerable population. In the Cape winelands, where I live, vaccination rates stand at 89.6% for those 60 and older, but only 62.6% for those in the 18- to 34-year-old group. I suspect that number is much lower for those in the 18- to 21-year-old bracket, the undergraduate student population. For reasons sociological and biological, telling students to socially distance is like telling your neighbour’s hound to stay on his side of the fence when both your pets are on heat. They’ll find a way.
With more than 1.5-million students in SA universities, technical colleges and some form of private higher education, making vaccines mandatory could not only save precious young lives, it could prevent the spread of infections to their families and friends, and complete strangers. It is time for higher education leaders to act quickly and courageously. Naturally, there should be exceptions on pertinent medical grounds or even as a matter of faith and conscience - and in these cases regular testing must be enforced. But for the rest, require vaccinations or terminate their registration.
Online learning is not a lasting solution to university education. You simply cannot teach a student the practice of teaching or the skills of surgery or the complex dance moves in a performance qualification without face-to-face instruction. More than that, we have learnt from recent research in schools and universities that learning is a deeply social event, which means we learn best from and among others in the educational environment. Then, of course, there is the mental and emotional health of some students who are at risk from learning in long periods of isolation.
Students, especially those doing their first degree, do not only go to university to fetch a qualification. They want the full experience of an undergraduate education in residence life, sport, music, recreation and the company of others. There is already a whole class of students who would have missed out on those rich memories of joyful learning, living and loving in the undergraduate years. There is only one way to return to some sense of normal on campuses and that is to get everyone vaccinated at pace.
Needless to say, the broader community off-campus also benefits when all SA’s tertiary education students are fully vaccinated. That alone moves all of us closer to the point where we can live freely and without fear of illness and death. It is time for our vice-chancellors to show decisive leadership with respect to vaccine mandates on their respective campuses.
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