During his address to the nation this week, President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the first doses of a life-saving Covid-19 vaccine will arrive in the country in the second quarter of this year. Ramaphosa said this with some pride, presumably believing it will provide hope to a people anxious about the numbers of fellow citizens dying of Covid-19.
On Tuesday, the day after Ramaphosa spoke, SA tallied 497 deaths in a single day — the highest number of deaths recorded in a 24-hour period — and the hopes of many hinged on the delivery of an effective vaccine.
Predictably, wealthy countries such as the US, UK, Canada and most of Europe have begun rolling out the vaccine. But developing nations such as Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile have done so as well, raising the question why it will take more than three months for the South Africans most in need of it to get a shot at survival.
The New York Times reported this week how global inequality is determining who gets the vaccine and who doesn’t. It said that in a few months’ time the South African pharmaceutical company Aspen Pharmacare will be producing a million doses a day of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that will be shipped to rich countries in the West that have pre-ordered hundreds of millions of doses. However, the only South Africans with a chance of getting that same vaccine — well suited to South African conditions because it doesn’t need cold storage and promises to work using a single dose and not two — are the poor who have been participating in clinical trials.
By the time we see the first doses trickle in in the middle of next year, rich countries will likely have vaccinated tens of millions of their citizens with a vaccine we helped to make and which poor people in SA were used as guinea pigs to trial. How is this the best that we as a country can do? While we understand that the country cannot afford to spend vast sums pre-ordering vaccines that we are not yet completely sure will work, can we not use the fact that it will be manufactured locally and was tested by our own citizens to ensure that we get swifter access to it?
The government recently announced that the first inline to receive vaccination will be our health workers, followed by our elderly.
As you will see on these pages this week, our health workers are paying the ultimate price for their position on the frontline against the disease. Three of them died of Covid-19 this week alone at one state hospital in eThekwini, bringing the number to 436 around the country since the pandemic began in SA.
And while some are dying, others are falling ill and have had to isolate at home, placing their own families at risk, and transferring the burden of caring for the sick to their burnt-out colleagues.
Nonsensical drinking challenges, selfish partying at nightclubs — which featured in many videos doing the rounds on social media this week — packed restaurants, beaches and church services have proved that we thoroughly earned the level 3 lockdown.
South Africans know all this, yet some among us persist in ignoring the only methods available that will keep us safe from infection: wearing masks over our noses and mouths, washing our hands frequently, and physically distancing ourselves from others.
Tuesday ’s recorded death toll was 497 people. How many more must there be in a single day for some among us to understand that Covid-19 is a deadly disease?
Nonsensical drinking challenges, selfish partying at nightclubs — which featured in many videos doing the rounds on social media this week — packed restaurants, beaches and church services have proved that we thoroughly earned the level 3 lockdown the president placed us under this week.
It is time for us to grow up.
We need to realise that the only way we can give our health workers and vulnerable loved ones a chance to live is to be responsible and follow the social-distancing, mask-wearing and hand-sanitising guidelines. Because it will be a few months still before we can get our hands on any vaccine.
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