South Africa-Division, Disease, And Doubt

 

SOUTH AFRICA

Division, Disease and Doubts

South Africa was going to launch a massive campaign to inject its citizens with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. But researchers discovered that the vaccine wouldn’t prevent the spread of the country’s variant of the coronavirus. So, as the Associated Press reported, those plans had to be scrapped.

Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine might not be as effective against the South African variant as it is against other versions of the virus either, according to studies cited in a Reuters story. South Africa is therefore pinning its hopes on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, CNN wrote. It’s the first country to approve the use of the drug.

Meanwhile, of course, the pandemic continues to ravage the country, one of the hardest hit on the African continent.

Lee McCabe lost both his parents only a few weeks before the government rolled out the Johnson & Johnson inoculations. He had placed them in a cottage on his property to keep them safe. But they insisted on going home. Somewhere in between they caught COVID-19 and died.

“Maybe if we didn’t let them go home, they’d still be around,” McCabe told CBS News. “If this [a vaccine] arrived a few months earlier, their lives would have been saved. That makes me angry, because I feel that we have delayed so long in getting much needed help to people that need it.”

To many South Africans, there is a discrepancy between wealthy countries that can harness their formidable medical research infrastructure to care for their citizens and others that must scramble to survive the smacks of Apartheid, the racist system of segregation that South Africans overthrew in the early 1990s.

Thabo Cecil Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, evoked Apartheid when he spoke to the Intercept to publicly request that President Joe Biden allow South Africans to use the Moderna vaccine by waiving patent protections that now keep the country from administering it.

The legacy of Apartheid is also affecting public health efforts within South Africa. People celebrated when white-minority ruled ended. But governments since then have been corrupt and incompetent. Consider this Maverick piece on an alleged plan to defraud the South African police, for example.

Trust in officials is at a low, Agence France-Presse reported. Many people are skeptical of vaccines and hesitant to take them.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said he hoped South Africa could become self-reliant in manufacturing vaccines, according to Eyewitness News, a local outlet.

Self-reliance would certainly help the country’s efforts to fight the virus. But reaching that milestone is easier said than done.