DA believes the first vaccines are too late to prevent third wave
The Democratic Alliance (DA) says the country is likely to see a third wave of infections and another strict Covid-19 lockdown, due to the government's failure to secure doses on time.
South Africa received the first consignment of one million Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines on Monday afternoon.
DA leader, John Steenhuisen, says the first arrival of the vaccines by the end of January is a failure, not an achievement.
"With no significant vaccine arrivals until May and the bulk of what we can expect this year only arriving towards the end of the year, we find ourselves staring at a third wave come winter and with it another lockdown. But we have come to expect so little from the ANC that the arrival midst much fanfare, two months late, of vaccines for just 0.8% of the population is seen as a good news story.
“While other countries with comparable economies are already administering hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 vaccines per day, South Africa is yet to administer a single dose," says Steenhuisen.
He has criticised government, saying more effort and taxpayers’ money was spent keeping people off the beaches than procuring life-saving vaccines.
"Government’s repeated promises of reaching herd immunity this year are therefore a pipedream born of lazy analysis, wishful thinking and political spin. Nothing could show more clearly how out of touch with reality our government is. With only enough vaccines arriving this year for 15 to 18 million people – and the bulk of these in the second half of the year, it is unlikely we’ll vaccinate even a third of the number required for herd immunity," adds Steenhuisen.
Steenhuisen says the government doesn't even have a comprehensive procurement and rollout plan.
On Monday evening, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that millions of vaccines are expected to be delivered by the second quarter of 2021, including some 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
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