It’s fitting that in a mad week of an insane year, we had US President Donald Trump speaking of the Covid-19 vaccine as “the gold standard in safety” even as Mogoeng Mogoeng, the face of SA’s widely respected judiciary, floated hocus-pocus conspiracies about the vaccine being “of the devil”.

Mogoeng’s judicial colleagues, who held the line against the government’s capricious lockdown rules this year, will surely be cringing that this is the man who remains their putative figurehead as chief justice...