Editorial
Johannesburg - In less than a fortnight’s time, the 18 – 34 cohort in South Africa will be eligible to register to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It’s a vital demographic, even more important than the 35-49 group that went before them.
This is the true social media generation, able to change minds and attitudes through the tap of a smartphone screen with a video, a comment, a share or just a like. They are in many ways our bulwark against the growing anti-vaxxer lobby among the older sectors, the people who are increasingly using the same social media to be led astray by scientifically unsound content with often fatal consequences.
The vaccine does not stop you from contracting Covid-19 and it certainly is no antidote for wilful stupidity. But, it is an almost cast-iron guarantee that if you do contract the virus, you will not succumb.
Unlike the snake oil remedies and sheep dip quackery peddled by pseudo-scientists whose qualifications are in gullible doom scrolling than time in a lecture theatre, vaccines do work and have been working ever since 1796 when Edward Jenner began vaccinating patients against smallpox.
Jenner too had to face vaccine hesitancy – it took until 1980 for smallpox to be eradicated. We don’t have 184 years to get it right, unfortunately.
The current vaccine cohort has played an incredible role in changing the narrative about the Covid-19 vaccine, showing up in numbers when their time came to register. We need the next group to do even better.
After that, it will be up to the South African society, as a whole, to start tightening the screws.
We can’t make it mandatory for everyone to be vaccinated, yet we can certainly stop them for sharing the same spaces as the rest of us.
This is NOT an intellectual debate any more, but seriously, life or death.