SA should make vaccines mandatory

South Africans have been under some form of lockdown for over 600 days.

That’s over twenty months of the country being told when it is legal to be outside their homes and when it is not.

The lockdown has all but destroyed the economy and just this past week it was confirmed that unemployment figures are at their highest figure ever: 46.6% (when discouraged people who have stopped looking for employment are included).

The price of petrol is also at an all-time high, meaning that even the employable population is feeling the brunt of the pandemic.

Ending the lockdown will not magically solve South Africa’s problems but it will go a long way in providing some sort of relief to everyone.

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It appears the president and his government have forgotten that the primary reason for enforcing a lockdown was to save lives.

The lockdown was not a voluntary measure in which South Africans were allowed the choice of whether to obey restricted conditions. It was made compulsory.

Wearing a mask in public became mandatory. Businesses were instructed to shut down, not asked. In some sectors of the economy, especially the hospitality, entertainment and liquor industries economic activities were shut down overnight.

The primary aim of all those actions was to save lives. Besides restricting movement (and therefore economic activity), the only other mechanism that has been shown to save lives is vaccinating against Covid.

The government has thus far decided to make vaccination a personal choice.

The lockdown wasn’t left to personal choice, wearing masks isn’t either. But the one activity that has been scientifically shown to give protection against the existing strains of the virus is left to people to decide.

The official Covid death figure for the country is at the 90 000 mark. Statistics on excess deaths actually show that the real figure of deaths from the pandemic could be as high as 270 000.

That is over a quarter of a million deaths that should not have occurred if the pandemic was not around.

The lockdown could not save those people, and judging by the very slow uptake of the free vaccination, the continued lockdown will still not save thousands of more lives.

Why is the government only now looking into the possibility of making vaccinating mandatory? Why isn’t it mandatory when figures show three times the size of a full FNB stadium has been decimated by the pandemic?

South Africa is a developing country and the logistics of proving vaccination status will be a challenge in most places but that does not mean it should not be done.

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This lockdown that has battered this economy so badly can be ended. There will always be new variants emerging because Covid is a tricky virus.

The country cannot afford to go into a harder lockdown each time a new variant drives a new wave of infections and deaths.

The anti-vaxxers are having a field day mocking everyone who will have to take booster shots each time a new variant is discovered but they are not telling the world how to stop more people from dying in addition to the over 5 million deaths already recorded worldwide.

President Ramaphosa, make the vaccine mandatory and allow normal economic activity to start again.