by David Biggs
When a drowning man is thrown a lifebuoy the last thing he will worry about is whether the floatation device carries a valid SABS safety certificate.
If it floats he’ll grab it gratefully. This is why I was puzzled by our government’s hesitation about accepting Ivermectin as a possible treatment for Covid-19.
Okay, it’s intended to be a parasite remedy for animals, but many people around the world have claimed it helped them to recover from the pandemic; and several other countries have approved it for human use.
So why did our health authorities dither and disapprove of it for so long. It may have side effects, they claimed, but, for goodness sake, one of the “side effects” of Covid-19 is death. Take your pick.
People who have suffered the disease say it’s the most horrible experience; the pain and delirium is almost unbearable.
If Ivermectin had been offered to them they would probably have grabbed it with both hands like the drowning man and the lifebuoy. But sorry chum, only animals can have it, so shut up and suffer.
It’s not even as though the health authorities have anything else to offer. While the rest of the world is administering millions of vaccine shots daily, our sleepy leaders are still to produce a single dose.
Even though the first batch of vaccines is expected in the country today it will be some two weeks before it is actually available to anybody.
Apparently it has to be quarantined first for 10 to 14 days. You only have to listen to any news broadcast to know how many people will die during those two quarantine weeks.
In the Covid war every day costs lives. One aspect that bothers me about this whole vaccine fall-about is the matter of queues. There will obviously be long queues once the vaccines actually materialise.
State organisations have shown time and again that they are incapable of organising a proper queue. People spend days in government queues.
Elderly folk and disabled people queue overnight. They sleep queuing. They poop in their pants in queues because there are no toilets provided and if they step out of the queue they lose their place and their social grant.
People queue for eight hours in the hot sun in Fish Hoek to renew their car licences. I believe there’s a good living to be made holding places for people in queues.
I queue happily in my local supermarket or fish-n-chip shop and the queue moves along efficiently. But a government queue is chaos. If we ever hope to get our people vaccinated we’re going to need a whole lot of queuing practice.
* "Tavern of the Seas" is a daily column written in the Cape Argus by David Biggs. Biggs can be contacted at [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus