South Africans forced to pay the price for Ramaphosa’s catastrophic vaccine failure
27 June 2021
Every covid death and every job lost to the draconian restrictions he announced tonight are on President Ramaphosa now. He is now forcing South Africans to pay the price for his administration’s catastrophic vaccine failures, or “missteps” as he calls them.
The DA has called for a comprehensive parliamentary inquiry into government’s handling of the vaccine programme. There must be accountability for this failure.
To much media fanfare, Ramaphosa personally took delivery of one million AstraZeneca vaccines in February. These alone could have protected 500 000 high-risk individuals from severe disease or death, saving lives and taking pressure off our healthcare system during this inevitable third wave. The DA pleaded with him to administer them as per scientific and WHO advice, but instead he sold them.
South Africans are being battered by the third wave with less than 1% of the population fully vaccinated. Not one single Covax vaccine has been administered. (To think Ramaphosa was planning to rely solely on Covax vaccines.) Today, only 2 289 vaccines were administered. Compare that with Chile, which months ago reached rates of 300 000 jabs a day.