Maverick Citizen

MAVERICK CITIZEN OP-ED

Don’t politicise vaccination — it’s too important

Don’t politicise vaccination — it’s too important
Protesters against mandatory vaccination gather at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town on 21 August 2021. (Photo: Gallo Images / ER Lombard)

The local government elections are expected to happen in eight weeks. This is also the crucial period for accelerating Covid-19 vaccinations if we are to avoid a catastrophic fourth wave of the pandemic in South Africa. We can’t let politics undermine the national effort to save lives.

Peter Benjamin is the coordinator of the SA Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) social listening team, and a steering committee member of the People’s Health Movement and the People’s Vaccine Campaign. Pauline Maketa is a coordinator of the Community Constituency Forum. She is a gender activist with a mission to change the plight of young girls and women against gender-based violence and gender discrimination.

The Constitutional Court has ruled that the local government elections must be held between 27 October and 1 November 2021. The political campaigning for this has already started.

The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have killed about a quarter of a million South Africans (excess deaths calculated by the SAMRC, see here). There is a grave risk of a devastating fourth wave of the pandemic that is predicted in the country around November or December that could kill many more. The only thing that could significantly reduce the deadliness of the fourth wave is having a large percentage of the population vaccinated against Covid-19. 

After a stuttering start, the vaccine roll-out has increased pace. Last week, around 250,000 people were vaccinated on each working day. More than 13 million doses of Covid vaccines have been injected into almost 10 million South African arms (see here). 

To reach a level of population immunity and reduce the damage of the pandemic, save lives, reduce devastating illnesses and allow our society and economy to reopen, we need to achieve about 40 million fully vaccinated people. We are only vaccinating people over 18 years old and 40 million is a very high percentage of adults in the country. Many people are unwilling to be vaccinated and the issue of vaccine resistance is well known. 

The vaccination roll-out has already been politicised. A new community organisation, the National Vaccine Monitoring Group (NVMG), has developed from the C-19 People’s Coalition (Gauteng) community organising working group and University of Johannesburg research projects. The NVMG is active in 35 informal settlements, rural villages and townships in eight provinces of the country. It is demanding easier access to vaccination sites, and for health facilities to be open over weekends. The NVMG reports that “In a couple of places our volunteers were accused of working for Ramaphosa, with serious threats in one case.” 

Our President, Cyril Ramaphosa, champions the vaccination drive, the government as a whole supports it and at the local level, many councillors promote it. That makes it very easy for opposition parties to also turn their opposition into hostility to the vaccination campaign. With so much unhappiness due to the lockdown, it’s easy politics for any party to be against all non-pharmaceutical interventions to Covid-19 infection. 

Already leaders of the ACDP (here) and the FF+ (here) have said they won’t vaccinate.

Of course, Covid vaccines and the vaccination programme are intensely political — vaccine nationalism and hoarding by the Global North, intellectual property rights restricting vaccine production worldwide, class divisions in access to vaccination services in South Africa, to name a few issues. 

What is being referred to in this article is party politics, the contestation between political parties in the next eight weeks before the local government elections. Party politically charged arguments over vaccines could easily make the vaccine roll-out fail, leading to greater infections and deaths this summer. 

Can we have a political pact? 

All political parties agree that the vaccination roll-out is off the agenda for political campaigning. All seem to agree that the vaccine roll-out is too important to play politics. The national interest requires the whole of society to support this. All political parties must demonstrate their responsibility and wish to protect all South Africans and that they understand science.

Can there be a call for this throughout South Africa? Will our world-class medics, our leaders in faith organisations, civil society, unions, community organisations and business — as well as millions of people throughout our country — demand that our politicians show responsibility and put the health and lives of South Africans above fighting for political power?

Please support the petition calling on the leaders of all South African political parties to be responsible and put the lives of all South Africans first. Please sign here and encourage your friends, family and others to sign.

Vaccination roll-out has been called a race between infection and injection. Now add election. DM/MC

Gallery

Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Sean de Waal says:

    Anti-vaxxers are anti-science, anti-sense, and anti-research. Anyone who has unreasonably refused to be vaccinated should not be allowed to access hospital care if they get Covid. If you don’t trust the best medical minds in the world to create a vaccine, then don’t trust medical science to bail you out when you’re gasping for oxygen when the virus takes hold of your immune system. Instead, stay at home with your garlic tablets and horse de-wormer and, also, shut up!

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