Assessment of president’s vaccination is grossly unfair

Peter Bruce’s opinion piece, “First in the land shouldn’t always mean first in line” (February 21), is a grossly unfair assessment of President Cyril

Ramaphosa’s decision to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

To compare the president’s decision to a captain who abandoned ship clearly shows that Bruce does not spend any time conversing/engaging with South African citizens besides the extremely privileged, like him. In Africa, and indeed globally, where many leaders enforce Covid denialism, vaccine fear and conspiracy theories, Ramaphosa’s action is to be commended.

He has always put out clear, consistent messaging and leadership action to South Africans during this pandemic.

To the majority of South Africans in farflung rural areas, with a genuine fear and hesitancy about vaccination, the president’s action was correct. To paint it in any other way is mischievous.

Dr Vuyokazi J November, specialist anaesthetist, Eastern Cape department of health, Gqeberha

Covid articles could confuse

The Q&A column on February 21 with professor Glenda Gray uncovers some of the logic that resulted in the effective “dumping” of 1.5-million doses of potentially life-saving vaccine.

If there is one thing that worries a scientist, it is when a fellow scientist turns politician and starts speaking in algorithms in a newspaper column.

Reading between the lines, it would seem the government was steered towards abandoning the AstraZeneca rollout and selecting an alternative option. No problem. Choosing another option in this case was understandable (if not a bit premature). What is illogical is effectively abandoning 1.5-million doses of potentially life-saving vaccine.

As professor Shabir Madhi of Wits University has indicated, there is a high probability the AstraZeneca vaccine will prevent serious illness. Secondly, there are millions of South Africans who are not going to get vaccinated in the next 12 months whatever vaccine is deployed. At the very least, these 1.5-million doses could have been deployed to this category.

This is a no-lose situation. Firstly, the vaccine has few if any side-effects. Secondly, the deployment of this vaccine could form part of another clinical trial with respect to its efficacy in SA to prevent serious disease in emerging variants. Thirdly, by dumping or trading this vaccine, SA will get very little (or nothing) in return. It seems somewhat cynical to donate this vaccine to our neighbours if we have such misgivings about it. Fourthly, the people vaccinated using these doses are likely not to have any alternative options in any case. For them there is only an upside.

This line of reasoning appears to conform with the thoughts of other Wits scientists in another column in the Sunday Times on February 21, “SA to press on with Pfizer jab”. I suspect many of the readers who looked at all the (contradictory) Covid-related articles might be left somewhat confused.

Professor Kurt Sartorius, School of Nursing and Public Health, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Hoarding narrative is a distraction

I refer to two articles in the Sunday Times of February 21 — “Fighting fake news on the global frontline” by UCT professor Herman Wasserman and “For our own health, take Afropessimism with a pinch of salt” by Lindiwe Mazibuko, with particular reference to her “most chilling of all is the growing phenomenon of vaccine hoarding by rich nations” narrative.

We know that our government chose to financially bail out SAA and Eskom instead of meeting a deposit deadline to the World Health Organisation (WHO) for a Covid-19 vaccine. We also know that the ANC mismanaged/misspent huge sums of borrowed money meant for fighting the pandemic and that at least part of that could have gone towards the WHO deposit but also didn’t.

Now we see articles that finance minister Tito Mboweni is having a herculean task finding funding for vaccinations. Clearly, our government blew money that could have easily covered the WHO vaccine deposit and still met its deadline. So why are we now being encouraged to feel sympathy for our finance minister and hate the West for hoarding?

In the meantime, we learn that our particular Covid-19 strain is tougher than the others and that even the two US vaccines may not do the job. Are we supposed to say thank goodness we didn’t pay the WHO a deposit? Of course not. The US and others, at this moment, are working on a vaccine that will do the job. A deposit to the WHO would have put more pressure on the US pharmaceutical companies and still have us in line for it when it was ready.

This easy-to-refute “vaccine hoarding by rich nations” narrative is meant to distract us from seeing our own government’s role in our self-inflicted vaccine mess and is furthermore meant to tarnish the capitalist West that was capable of developing several Covid-19 vaccines in record time. How can there be hoarding when Canada and the US are still trying to vaccinate their own high-priority recipients? They still haven’t got around to vaccinating even their general citizens yet, and won’t be able to for some months.

What is most disturbing is that one doesn’t see that “hoarding of vaccines by rich nations” narrative being refuted in our media. We’ll never move forward as a country as long as citizens don’t think for themselves and don’t question the motives and truthfulness of all that they come across.