Vaccine drive hits hurdle
NO TRUST: ‘RUMOURS AND MYTHS HAVE A BASIS IN REAL ANXIETIES’
Common belief is that the jabs are ploy to destroy Africans.
At the very mention of the word “vaccine”, 82-year-old Josefine Hlomuka vehemently shook her head, her face clouding with worry in Johannesburg’s Soweto township.
“We don’t trust,” she whispered, haunted by the four decades she spent under apartheid.
Although white-minority rule was swept away a generation ago, faith in South Africa’s government today, its reputation undermined by corruption and incompetence, is poor. Such deep-rooted distrust, say experts, lies behind vaccine scepticism.
Vaccine hesitancy is growing, even as leaders prepare an inoculation campaign set to begin this month to vaccinate around twothirds of the 60 million-strong population by the end of this year.
But fears span generations in Soweto’s White City neighbourhood, where iron-domed roofs recall a time when the area hosted military barracks.
“I saw [online that] people are getting injected but they die,” said Soweto-raised Tshegofatso Mdluli, 22.
“What if most people get a third-grade kind of vaccine?” fretted Mbali Tshabalala, 35. “It gives me sleepless nights.”
Scepticism and suspicion have fed into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the pandemic. “Rumours and myths have a basis in real anxieties,” said Helen Schneider, a professor of public health at the University of the Western Cape. And those anxieties in turn stem from “very concrete experiences”.
She pointed to the evidence of a secret apartheid-era chemical warfare programme in the 1980s to develop injections to curb the fertility of black citizens. The head of that programme, cardiologist Wouter Basson – dubbed “Dr Death” – came back to haunt the public psyche last month when it emerged he was still practising at private clinics.
Similar suspicions played out in the roll-out of HIV treatment in the early 2000s in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, Doctors Without Borders veteran Eric Goemaere recalled, saying: “[Many thought] white people... invented something new to dominate [and] control.”
Public officials were trying to cut through misinformation long before the first batch of SA vaccines arrived on Monday.
“False information and fake news can and does put lives at risk,” President Cyril Ramaphosa wrote in a weekly letter to the nation last month. “We all need to work together to build confidence in the vaccine.”
In a public webinar on vaccines hosted by the health ministry last week, microbiologist Koleka Mlisana urged listeners not to believe “everything you read in WhatsApp messages”. Tackling widely-disseminated stories, she said “there are no microchips or tracking devices in vaccine bottles” and that “no vaccine will alter DNA”, before using global death figures to debunk a common belief the jabs are a ploy to “destroy Africans”.
One January poll by Ipsos found only 51% of South Africans would get a coronavirus vaccine – a 17% drop since October. But another survey by the University of Johannesburg suggested 67% were willing.
Sara Cooper, a senior scientist at the SA Medical Research Council, said: “The problem with vaccine hesitancy is even small amounts can have big effects.”
Civil society has pitched in alongside government to disseminate accurate information about coronavirus and upcoming vaccines. But “there is a problem with top-down information,” said Mocke Jansen Van Veuren, running a coronavirus workshop in Soweto, where anger towards the government repeatedly surfaced.
“Government is a suspicious source, unfortunately, they lie to us about a lot of things.”
Govt is a suspicious source, unfortunately