“There is no virus,” read one of the placards at a recent anti-vax protest held, of all places, near Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital, as doctors and nurses inside this famous health facility battled to save lives ravaged by coronavirus infections. More than 79,421 dead, but there is no virus. “I am not a lab rat,” read another. Trust me, the fact that the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week fully approved Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine will do nothing to change made-up minds.
“We support Susan” troubled me. I know Dr Susan Vosloo well. She is one of the University of the Free State’s (UFS) most distinguished graduates (first woman heart surgeon), who served on the university council during my tenure as vice-chancellor. I spent time with her in Cape Town medical suites and saw photographs of her heart-transplant patients on the walls, including one of a childhood friend who recently died of, you guessed it, Covid-19. Smart, charming and unassuming, I was devastated to hear the famous doctor make the nonsense claim that “the risk of the vaccine is worse than [the] risk of the virus”. That virtually every medical scientist disagrees with this statement does not matter to the “anti-vax” crowd; here is a doctor to back them up.
What really gets my goat is the billboard in Maitland, visible from a major Cape Town expressway (the M5): “In God we trust. No vaccines for us.” Apparently the rest of us trust in Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist who has funded vaccine development and supported health research and development across the world. I can’t understand how fundamentalist Christians come to believe God and science work in opposite directions. Church leaders have a lot to account for in misleading their sheep. Right now, there are Covid-19-denying pastors on ventilators and some of them have succumbed to this terrible disease. Another anti-vax placard from a US protest reads: “The blood of Christ is my vaccine.” This prompted a Twitter hack representing God (old white man with beard, his profile pic) to respond with this gem: “Then you can look forward to meeting him very soon.” Blasphemous, some would say.
What about going door to door to start vaccinating people in their homes? Time is against us. What about incentivising people to become vaccinated — R200 in your pocket if you show up? How about pop-up vaccination centres in areas that have high infection rates, but low vaccination rates?
“We do not consent to medical tyranny,” was another of the Groote Schuur protest placards. Now imagine you’re a health worker exposing yourself (and your family) to the deadly virus every single day as you brave the Covid-19 wards in your hospital inside that suffocating PPE suit for the lives of others. “Medical tyranny” is not what you want to hear.
Moving forward, I agree with those who argue it is time to ignore the anti-vax crowd. Do not give them oxygen. Our social and financial resources should focus on the vaccine hesitant, those who can be persuaded to change their minds. Why? “Total vaccine refusal is far less common than vaccine hesitancy,” reports a study published last month in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine.
One way to do that is to accelerate the numbers of people who get vaccinated; that momentum itself will bring some of the unvaccinated on board. We are still not doing enough. What about going door to door to start vaccinating people in their homes? Time is against us. What about incentivising people to become vaccinated — R200 in your pocket if you show up? How about pop-up vaccination centres in areas that have high infection rates, but low vaccination rates?
Where is the imagination in the public and private health sectors to get us over the line as soon as possible? There is some momentum; this week we passed the 11-million mark for total jabs, with 5.14-million fully vaccinated, posted @miamalan on her most informative Twitter feed. However, we heard the experts say the herd immunity train has left the station. The task is to evacuate as many of the vulnerable, but also the youth, at speed. We should have started the inoculation of 18-year-olds-plus months ago. Despite early enthusiasm, it is too early to know whether enough of the 18- to 35-year-olds will show up as a cohort, so we need to keep pressing home the vaccination message with or without the Digital Vibes money.
In the end, overcoming vaccine hesitancy is not a government problem, but one that must be addressed across the leadership spectrum, from religious leaders, employers, school principals and parents. Which raises an interesting question. Why are the deans of our university medical schools so silent? Are they also conflicted or simply lacking courage?
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