Vaccine card fraud to be met by ‘full might of the law’
Dr Keith Cloete, head of health in the Western Cape, has issued a stern warning — anyone fraudulently trying to get a vaccine certificate without being vaccinated will face the full might of the law.
Speaking at the department’s weekly virtual session on Covid-19 in the province, he said: “We have had reports of people fraudulently trying to get a vaccine card to enable them to travel without getting the vaccine.
“On so many levels, this is troubling for us. “Those people will be reported, investigated and followed up — and the full might of the law will be visited upon them,” he said.
Cloete said any person involved in the rollout who “allows this practice to flourish” would be contributing to untold damage in the fight against Covid-19, and they too — along with the person seeking the fraudulent card — would be severely dealt with.
Also on the topic of those who had not been vaccinated, Cloete noted their high presence in ICU and high care admissions.
He said doctors working in the province, who had battled through all three waves, had witnessed many lives lost.
In the third wave, doctors had told him “without fail” that those getting critically ill and dying were those who were unvaccinated.
He said data from the UK, which was more robust as their vaccine rollout was older, clearly documented this same pattern.
The hotspot for hesitancy in the province is Mitchells Plain, according to Cloete, where only about a quarter of eligible people have registered.
“The phenomenon of that area is something we are examining to find out exactly what the drivers are.
“We have done general awareness raising, but have also started doing targeted interventions in such areas.
“We are asking questions like who are the opinion leaders there and how is information distributed?
“We have started with religious leaders, but we are also looking at other community opinion leaders,” he said.
This was against a backdrop of the province still being in the throes of the third wave peak, though some early signs of a decline were beginning to come through.
Hospital admissions were flattening, but oxygen use was going up, and the reproductive number was still 1.1, which meant the province was not yet off the peak.
Of those being tested, 41.5% were turning up positive and that was high, Cloete said, adding that there were on average 3,004 new daily infections in the province, with about 339 hospital admissions a day.
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