LETTER: Better cautious than careless with vaccines

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein claims SA has a worse Covid vaccination record than Zimbabwe, Algeria, Cuba and Libya, and is barely ahead of Afghanistan, Iraq and Venezuela (“Our leaders prove immune to vaccination efforts”, June 29). He also compares SA to Chile, Cambodia, Colombia, Morocco and Turkey.

He correctly takes this information from Our World in Data, but what the chief rabbi doesn’t tell readers is that most of the countries mentioned above have vaccinated their citizens mainly with the Chinese, Russian or Cuban vaccines. Oxford/AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the Indian vaccine have been used in only a handful of cases.

Moreover, many of these vaccines were donations and were only domestically approved, as was the case in Zimbabwe, under emergency measures. The efficacy of these vaccines is still uncertain and is thought to be just above 50%, which I understand is the pass rate to help control the epidemic. This compares with 72% for the one-shot Johnson & Johnson jab and 95% after two jabs of the Pfizer vaccine, according to US studies.

Last week the highly-respected SA Health Products Regulatory Authority authorised the Chinese vaccine Sinovac, pending final results of ongoing clinical studies that still need to be submitted. The World Health Organisation validated the Sinovac vaccine on June 1.

Goldstein also argues that the government has blocked private sector efforts to procure vaccines because of concerns about equal access to the jabs. He, like a number of well-to-do South Africans, seems to think the private sector would have done a better job distributing vaccines to the nearly 84% of South Africans who have no private medical aid and rely solely on public health.

Yet the chief rabbi correctly points out that the success of Britain’s vaccination scheme was dependent on the highly centralised National Health Service. In the US, Israel and Europe the vaccination programme has also been heavily dependent on federal or central government intervention — not just to assure equitable access, but also to campaign and organise for all people to be vaccinated.

I’m therefore not certain why Goldstein and some other fashionable opinion leaders suggest that SA should have been one of the few countries to do things differently. There are many problems with the management of the pandemic worldwide, as well as in SA, and there will be many lessons to be learnt once a review can take place. At best, we can say the SA health authorities have been cautious about how the vaccine money has been spent; at worst they haven’t planned well.

If we’re going to say our programme has been a disaster and government officials should repent, let’s make certain we’re not making judgments based on the bubbles of our own lives, where we choose data points to support our views rather than really analysing what the problem is.

Robert Taylor

Parkhurst

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