Should we really prioritise the Covid-19 vaccination of prisoners?

One of the major unspoken realities of living in an unequal society such as South Africa is that differing interests often lead to differing views on policy.

If you are wealthy, you have no interest in your tax going to public schools your kids may never attend. If you’re poor, you’d likely need tax-funded schools. At least this is how it is generally perceived.

This view, though, has always been a short-sighted one to me. I should like to imagine that even the rich may benefit from collective better education of the population in the form of long-term economic growth, less incentive for crime and the like. As for the poor, an understanding that lifelong government reliance is unsustainable.

Beyond that, services offered by the state can be of shoddy quality and often demeaning. Trekking kilometres to schools where teachers couldn’t be bothered to show up is just a simple example.

Putting the quality of what’s on offer aside for a moment, the concept seems to be sound. Even though only one may directly benefit, the overall benefit is communal and in the case of education, even national.

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When it comes to vaccines, their limited numbers and who gets them, it makes sense to ask what we want from them, which I can only imagine is to stop the spread of the virus and resultant deaths. To do this, one must manage what we have. Sure if we had 60 million units today, this wouldn’t be an issue but we don’t.

So how do we get the most bang for the vaccines we will be getting? We identify who would be most likely to contract and spread the virus. Immediately that would mean that one should target prisoners, because they’re in constant close contact and typically more susceptible.

People who would argue that they don’t deserve the vaccine as a matter of urgency are either focused on the wrong argument or don’t understand gardening; when you remove weeds, you don’t simply pluck the tips off, you have to get to the root.

Similarly vaccinating prisoners is not a matter of whether they deserve it or not. It is a matter of their visitors, the ones being released during lockdown, the guards who go home to their families, the kitchen staff washing plates, cleaners scrubbing bathrooms, etc. It’s about the people at heightened risk.

We don’t want to vaccinate frontline health workers urgently simply because they “deserve” it. We want to do it because they’re likely the most at risk, and to simply shift the rationale just because we don’t like prisoners is both philosophically inconsistent and something you wouldn’t be saying when your partner who works as a prison psychologist comes home after an eight-hour shift.

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But I’m still rather angry at the prospect, not because I think it is a bad idea but because I can’t imagine it being properly done. It’s not like we have a great track record of this government’s handling of most public goods, let alone its handling of the pandemic.

Take the schools example above, or our energy crisis, or how we nearly had a metro with no water, while the priority was fighting over whose responsibility it was.

Now we’re expected to trust it will all be magically well coordinated after billions were lost and discussions of raising taxes to fund the vaccination programme are underway. Sigh.

We couldn’t even get the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) payments right, but somehow people on the ground will be expected to keep vaccines at the right temperature and administer the staged jabs at the right time.

I can already picture headlines in a couple of months reading something along the lines of, “Vaccines spoil after being left in the Limpopo sun”.

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Frankly, the debate on whether prisoners should get the vaccine is a silly one. It is silly mostly because the obvious answer is yes, for the good of the country, but also silly because there’s nothing to show that we would get it right regardless of who is prioritised.

Richard Anthony Chemaly. Entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer of communication ethics

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