In the race between Covid-19 and vaccines, South Africa has finally got off the starting blocks after months of frustration.
Further away, Germany is banning travellers from the UK, highlighting another problem that won’t be fixed by the feel-good factor of getting jabs in the arms of one’s own population.
The irony of the German step, effective from Sunday, is that Britain has been among the star vaccinators and is on track to have covered its whole population in a couple of months, allowing it to ease lockdown restrictions. It’s been beating Germany on most measures, with a higher rate of inoculations, while infections and death rates have dropped dramatically.
That wasn’t enough to prevent Germany designating it “a variant area” of concern, a fate that South Africans, who’ve been barred from travelling to much of the world since late 2020, will be very much aware of. In the German case, it said only its citizens and residents can enter from the UK, due to the emergence of the variant first identified in India.
And to add to the confusion, that came despite studies showing the Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs used in Britain are highly effective against the B.1.617.2 variant. On the other hand, travellers from Germany are allowed to enter the UK. Spain, for whom British tourists are a key source of income that was missed in the summer of 2020, has in the meantime lifted all restrictions on them. Why a variant from the UK would be more dangerous to Germans than to the Spanish is a complete mystery.
As South Africa finally gets its own vaccination programme rolling, it would be good to remember its responsibilities to the rest of the continent, even if only just to protect ourselves. Draconian border closures aren’t an option, at least not in the long term, so even if we have a successful programme, the sense of safety will be an illusion if the rest of the region is left behind or if the programme doesn’t reach the poorest and most isolated corners of this country.
Governments across the world have to talk up the mantra that “Covid anywhere, is Covid everywhere”, or that “nobody is safe until every one is safe”. But short-term political considerations mean that this doesn’t translate into action to spread vaccine access across the world.
They still seem to think that isolating one’s self is a viable strategy. Which of course isn’t. Everyone is aware not just of the dangers to the economic recovery but of new strains and variants being allowed to develop and mutate elsewhere, potentially making existing protections ineffective. Barring others from your country can work only so far. What is the history of humanity if not one of movement and immigration? It’s not a force that can be stopped.
In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong in celebrating the progress we are seeing at home.
It’s not terribly surprising that the process has been marred somewhat by a few glitches and unsatisfactory communication that has led to a perception that some, mainly wealthy people in suburbs, have been given privileged access. The apparent randomness of people hearing through the grapevine last week that they could simply walk into Discovery’s head office and claim a jab has been a source of much debate.
Given the supply-and-demand dynamics and the evidence that SA will have more jabs than it needs — a far cry from late December when officials were seemingly questioning whether we needed to get vaccines at all — this seems like a minor controversy. What’s more worrying is the possibility that not enough people will register and get the jabs administered.
If one depends on Twitter for information, the whole booking system has apparently already collapsed, which is contrary to the message that journalists got from a Business for SA (B4SA) briefing on Friday at which speakers said the start of the programme had been relatively smooth. They expressed optimism that it would be scaled up, having reached just under 120,000 people so far.
In a presentation on Friday, Martin Kingston, who heads up B4SA’s steering committee, said the priority was getting the estimated 5.4-million of the population who are over 60 vaccinated by the middle of winter, something that he said would prevent up to 40,000 deaths and reduce strain on the health system.
But so far only about 1.6-million, less than 30% of that group, have been captured on the centralised booking system. Insufficient take-up, due to various factors such as vaccine hesitancy and people in remote areas not being able to register, is a bigger danger than vaccines not being available.
It will still be a huge challenge to get to the magic 40-million figure needed to reach “herd immunity”. And it shouldn’t end there. For life to truly return to normal, herd immunity will need to be achieved across the globe, as IMF MD Kristalina Georgieva argued over the weekend. The amazing thing is how cheap this looks relative to the benefits, though it might not immediately seem so to those who are expected to foot the initial bill.
She said a global intervention that sees at least 40% of the world’s population vaccinated by the end of this year, and 60% in the first six months of 2022, would cost just $50bn. Small change if you believe the lender’s calculation that the benefit to the global economy from a faster end to the pandemic would be $9-trillion in less than four years.
It’s not always the easiest argument to make, but solidarity pays. And who doesn’t want to return to a world with no lockdowns or travel restrictions? Germany shutting out the UK shows that it’s not even a simple case of rich versus poor, within or between countries.