Warnings of a possible fourth wave ignored in favour of political expediency

When the President launched the Vaccination campaign on Friday in Katlehong, it coincided with the first day of the new level 1 lockdown regulations which he had announced just less than 24 hours earlier.

Lockdown level 1 allows up to 2 000 people for outdoor events and 750 people in indoor venues that can accommodate those numbers.

The irony of opening up a country that’s battling vaccine hesitancy the one day and launching a campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy the next might be lost on some people, but catastrophic Covid infection numbers might call his bluff in a month or two.

Election season is, indeed, silly season.

It is commendable that the government has finally decided to take on the anti-vaxxers, but the results of the campaign to get 70% of the adult population vaccinated by the end of December might be defeated by this illogical need for the country’s political parties to hold mass gatherings during a period which should be dedicated to turning the tide against antivaccination propaganda.

Andrew Gibbs of the South African Medical Research council wrote on the online publication The Conversation that by mid-August, only 40% of those who had vaccinated in South Africa were males.

Reasons for that vary from misguided ideas about their own masculinity to inaccessible vaccination sites.

The Vooma campaign aims to address the latter by bringing these sites to taxi ranks, shopping malls and the like but misses the point on the former, as demonstrated by the president’s antics at the launch.

As he addressed the crowd from the stage at the launch of the Vooma campaign, the President couldn’t suppress his own fits of laughter as he attempted to debunk one of the many myths that have been spread amongst the population by anti-vaxxers: “The Covid-19 vaccine causes erectile dysfunction.”

A real opportunity was missed to get the message across to the most hesitant section of the population that science does not agree with that myth.

It is quite clear that the government, the ruling party and all the political parties that have embarked on local election campaigns that draw large numbers of people to gather so they can try and convince them to vote for them, have abandoned all logic and science that says that mass gatherings can prove to be superspreader
events.

Warnings of a possible fourth wave of the pandemic have been ignored in favour of political expediency and winning votes.

The biggest spreaders of anti-vaccination propaganda are on social media platforms that are so readily accessible to any citizen with a half-decent smartphone and, logically, it follows that the best way to beat that disinformation is through campaigns that are waged on those platforms.

When the ruling party realised it was losing votes due to successful social media campaigns by opposition parties at the height of the anti-Zuma campaigns in the run-up to the 2016 local government elections, it is alleged that it established its own “war room” headed by social media-savvy influencers to discredit other parties and draw attention away from the negativity generated by then-president Jacob Zuma.

Now would be the most appropriate time to establish a government war room against anti-vaxxers, failing which parties might win elections but literally lose voters to death from Covid.