Our leaders don’t do efficiency, so open up the rollout

It is all very technical, epidemiology. While we are manifestly in our third wave of the pandemic in SA already, we are not officially there yet. We will be when our rolling seven-day average of new Covid cases reaches 30% of what they were at the peak of the second wave.

We topped out the second wave with a rolling average of 19,042 new cases on January 11. On January 14, deaths attributed to Covid reached a staggering 578, probably a sizeable undercount.

On Thursday the National Institute for Communicable Diseases counted 4,424 new cases. When the seven-day newcase rolling average gets past 5,700 we’re officially in the wave. Just a few more days then. Does it even matter?

It should draw us closer together as citizens and to an extent it has. Broadcaster Redi Thlabi has been magnificent in herding the unregistered and aged and poor into every queue she can find. But with an often dishonest and profoundly opaque government insisting on running the show she can make only the smallest of differences. In the distant hills and hidden villages of this vast country, people are sick already. There is pain and anguish everywhere. Many experts say the third wave will be worse than the second. Let’s assume it will just be equally bad.

The virus will laugh at the slow-motion “mass rollout” of vaccines now under way. There is only one vaccine being used. Pfizer is a good product but the government casually got rid of 1-million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine because in a small test in mainly young people it did not do well against the dominant coronavirus variant here.

So what? By now up to

1-million people, volunteers even, vaccinated with the

AstraZeneca shot would have been safe from suffering and death no matter how bad the third wave becomes.

We must never forget what the government did. Its sanctimonious claim that it is laser-focused on saving lives is hollow rubbish. Why get rid of a perfectly viable vaccine if the idea is to prevent death?

It smugly thought it had found the answer — the

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine would be produced in

Gqeberha, and we’ve ordered more than

30-million doses.

Except that the J&J product is still being held up, almost a month now. In the US, sure, but we can’t use it until the Americans clear it. So we are ploddingly getting the Pfizer vaccine into South African arms. It is way too late, though, to make much difference to the third wave.

For a start, you only begin to be protected two weeks after your first jab and you’re only fully vaccinated two weeks after your second. So if you get a vaccination tomorrow, you, and the people around you, will be safe (from you) round about the end of July.

Let’s also not forget that the department of health turned down an offer from Moderna, maker of possibly the most effective of the current vaccines, because it was too expensive. Yes, even more expensive than shutting down the economy again, which President Cyril Ramaphosa must be calibrating as he prepares to put us back into lockdown.

It is obviously wonderful to hear the joyful stories of people who have been vaccinated. Children worried about their ageing parents have cried with relief. We probably don’t fully appreciate yet what the fear inside us all has done to our spirits and our society.

But there is no question that the state is, again, failing. The health department’s electronic vaccine data system for registration and booking for a shot doesn’t work. The deputy health minister has urged people to simply pitch up at whatever vaccination station they can reach.

Indeed, citizens needed no invitation and are doing it for themselves in town and cities. The vaccination rollout is working, to the extent that it is, not in spite of the breakdown in the government system but because of it. People don’t trust the state. And who can blame them?

It is not as if we’re short of vaccines. According to a fine piece in the online news service GroundUp last week, there are way more vaccines in the country than vaccinators can use. GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen argued forcefully a few days earlier that the state should take its boot off the throat of the process and allow anyone to get vaccinated.

“Yes, those most in need should be vaccinated soonest,” he wrote, “but let’s not be strict with that. If a healthy 25-year-old takes the initiative to get vaccinated, let’s describe her as vaccine-keen, not a queue jumper.” I agree. Every shot counts and when I get mine I’d really love to find myself queuing up behind a teenager.

The rollout is working to the extent that it is not in spite of the failure of the government system but because of it