In part, the coronavirus vaccine story has improved a bit. Not because the government has actually communicated on the vaccines, about which President Cyril Ramaphosa swore to be completely transparent. It has been just the opposite. The relentless absence of communications has without question added to widespread despair and despondency about the virus.
Instead, it took the leaking of a letter from National Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane to Corruption Watch director David Lewis to crack open the door a little.
Written by Mogajane on January 18 as a reply to questions posed by Lewis, the letter makes clear that the Treasury has been asked for, and consented to, requests from the department of health for deviations from normal tendering procedures so it can buy vaccines and so that it can, without a tender process, also simply appoint four local logistics companies to store and distribute them. The deviations last, initially, for six months.
By the time they expire the government needs to have in place not only sufficient vaccine orders to inoculate 70% of the country (40-million people), but follow-up orders for more in case, as is often suspected, the virus, SARS-Cov-2, becomes a regular visitor like the flu.
In part, though, the letter is deeply depressing. It confirms that the government and its leadership have been asleep on the job. The request from health to the Treasury to negotiate directly with vaccine producers came only on January 6! It is now panic-buying. Finance minister Tito Mboweni presented two budgets after the virus struck here last year and made no provision for vaccines at all. The government simply forgot or it was appallingly advised.
But the leak also confirms that the government and its leadership have been asleep on the job
And after six months, when the storage and distribution contracts now being divvied up between Imperial Health Sciences, Danish-owned DSV, Clicks logistics arm United Pharmaceutical Distributors and state-controlled Biovac expire, expect a bunfight over new contracts as black business, as it has already indicated, moves to get a slice of the cake.
The department of health's procurement office (seriously?) is now actually permitted, Mogajane said, to negotiate directly with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca (through their marketing agents in India, Cipla and the Serum Institute of India) and, yes, Moderna. I know from an impeccable source in SA that Moderna has already given the health ministry an "indicative" price.
"It's expensive," the source said. But that doesn't rule it out of the mix. Cue hysteria from the Left, which believes we should be getting everything at cost, or better for free.
The Treasury and health department are hurrying to bolt together whatever they can. Some of the drugs may be expensive but they are a fraction of the opportunity cost of constantly shutting down the economy whenever the virus surges, which it often still will. It makes sense. Rather just order, pay the deposits and take whatever is available when it's available. We will figure out how to pay. A tax increase would be wildly counterproductive and lose the state tax money over time. South Africans would rather give the funds required to people directly who can't pay.
So far, though, we need to remind ourselves, not a single dose of vaccine has arrived in the country. A small amount, for just half the health workers, supposedly arrives later this month and next. Then there's more between April and June from Covax, a bilateral effort. That's all we know for sure. Ramaphosa has spoken about larger amounts but has failed to provide any details.
What, when and at what price are important elements of the communication required. One way to ease the anxieties about South Africans being cheated out of a fair deal would be for Ed Kieswetter, the head of Sars, to apply a unique tax code to Covid vaccines. That way the public and historians would be able to track at what price the drugs enter the country and what we actually end up paying out of our pockets.
Meanwhile, starved of treatments or vaccines, South Africans are buying up significant quantities of the animal anti-parasitic Ivermectin, in the belief that it might protect them from the worst effects of Covid should they be infected.
I've heard, but can't confirm, that in what may be a minor effort to corner a market, a group of people have bought hundreds of litre bottles in far-flung co-ops in Northern Cape towns like Fraserburg and Loxton. At the current recommended dosage, a litre would last a human five years.
Parts of the province have had good rains recently but farmers are now concerned that treatments for the inevitable parasites might not be available, so great has been the human demand. They are warning their co-ops not to let them down. It's a space to watch.
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