A vaccine we probably need, any way you say it
Adam Habib’s best parting gift to Wits University before he left as vice-chancellor was to appoint Shabir Madhi, the vaccinologist, dean of the Wits faculty of health sciences (medicine). In the face of the coronavirus he has been an ethical and a scientific rock.
He led the local trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine last year and again this year, this time to test the efficacy of the vaccine — of which the government had hastily ordered 1-million doses from India — against the new and more slippery South African variant, N501Y. Madhi was quick to warn that the trial had shown that the vaccine had little success in stopping infection and illness from N501Y. The government responded by halting the rollout of the vaccine to health workers and to begin using the promising Johnson & Johnson vaccine instead.
It now wants to sell on the million AstraZeneca doses it received at the end of January, but Madhi thinks we should use them instead. His intuition is that the AstraZeneca shot will help prevent severe disease, hospitalisation and death.
Given how little vaccine we have secured, why not use the AstraZeneca doses we already have? They expire in April and I’d take it in a heartbeat.
Ghana has just taken delivery of 600,000 doses and Unicef just signed a long-term agreement with AstraZeneca for it to supply the UN’s Covax facility. So it’s safe.
“There are strong and plausible biological reasons to hedge bets that it would protect against severe disease,” says Madhi. “The technology used for the AZ vaccine is very similar to the
[J&J] vaccine, and the two induce similar immune responses [and] this forms the basis for the WHO [World
Health Organisation] recommendation for the use of the AZ vaccine.
“The toss-up for high-risk groups, unless the government is able to immunise with another vaccine by April, is largely between taking an AZ vaccine that is safe and likely protects against severe disease, or remaining unvaccinated and unprotected before the next resurgence anticipated in May or June.”
And we are going to give a million doses away? Absolute madness.
Given how little vaccine we have secured, why not use the AstraZeneca doses we already have? I’d take it in a heartbeat
People should not be too angry about Gqeberha, the new name for Port Elizabeth. It is a decent thing to do. People who know PE as PE will call it that for the rest of their lives and that’s also fine. But PE is named for the wife of an English soldier, Sir Rufane Donkin, who came to the Cape Colony to mourn her death. He acted as governor for a year in 1821, conceitedly using his brief clout to name the city after his wife. Not many people get to do that and for Sir Rufane, time is up.
City names can live on, though, even as history shuffles along. My friend Maggie Brown in London reminds me how the English struggle in Wales. “In 1993 the Welsh Language Act gave the Welsh language equal status with English and that resulted in a huge surge of signage with the official end of Tudor Henry 8th laws of 1535-42 which made English the official language,” she writes to me.
News that Peter Hain as Welsh secretary put this into effect will not comfort PE die-hards. “So Cardiff the capital is also Caerdydd. [On signage] usually the Welsh name comes first. The further into Wales you go, the names are surviving Welsh ones like Aberystwyth. In historically disputed border areas both names are used: Welshpool is Y Trallwng. New Town is Y Drenewydd. There are even road signs in the Welsh borders to big towns like Amwythig, which the English like to call Shrewsbury.”
Much will be made of the new critical skills list, which defines which foreigners can come and work here. From what I can tell it’s as useless as the last list — no surprise, given that much the same people have drawn it up. The list is the product of the sharp business brains at the departments of labour and higher education, who hand it to home affairs, which barely implements it for the next five years. Sigh. No-one putting that list together has any idea of what this country needs in order to grow. If you’re going to measure success in more jobs then you first have to create more employers. So you either let foreigners in to settle here on condition that they each create, say, eight permanent jobs. Or you get foreign companies to come and do what they do, but here. Like BMW and Ford make cars here. Anything else is drivel.