Note: I edited this to fix formatting, and I initially suggested a different link [12], but have removed the suggestion, as the interesting point of the article is still made (the suspension of the specific vaccine).
___
There's some important details not mentioned in the article, which make this more of an emergency than a reader of just the article will notice.
Allow me to paint some back story, but the summary is this:
- We (our country) got 1 million doses of this vaccine last week, being ill-prepared and flustered to get our act together
- These doses expire in April, we do not have a roll-out strategy because politicians played politics (I'll explain below)
- We are broke, and the trust between people and gov is diminishing quickly
Initial Lockdown (March 2020)
Many people were initially positive when our first lockdown started. The President set up a "Solidarity Fund" [0], with initial donations of ~$70m USD (R1 billion) from a few wealthy families in the country.
The government 'diverted' funds to the PPE roll out, and the President expressly said that there wouldn't be looting [1] of funds.
The government put us in a quasi-martial-law with a committee called the NCCC [2] (name can be found in the link), parts of which have been taken to court, because of arbitrary laws/rules, and a very apparent power-grab by the ruling/governing party.
Some of the bizzare things that came out of this NCCC:
- A ban on cigarette sales, not substantiated by anything scientific at the time. They lost the court battle, but true to form, are appealing [3].
- Regulations on sales of winter clothes. Arbitrarily defining the details of clothes that can be bought or not, what aisles to be used. It was as ridiculous as talking about crop tops and tights [4].
- Instituting racist policies to only help certain businesses [5]. I feel obliged to say that I'm an African black, and I agree with the sentiment that this was unConstitutional, as we all should enjoy the same rights. The gist of this was that the President said something like "this is a chance to redistribute wealth by only supporting black businesses".
The above has been met with criticism, and has eroded trust.
PPE Looting/Corruption
Now, one only needs to search for "PPE Corruption South Africa" to get stories about articles almost-daily.
- Premiers (leaders of provinces) have been implicated or accused
- President's spokesperson has been suspended, and has failed to submit her financial interests [6]
- As of October 2020, at least $700M USD is under investigation for being looted for PPE [7]. Politically connected people were setting up companies, selling 100ml of sanitisers for up to $3000 USD, all sorts of horrors.
Anecdotally, one of the provincial ministers (MEC) of education, has been up in arms against a white-owned/run trade union called Solidariteit, for deciding to build their own techno-university with private funds.
The university was to cost ~$20M USD, and has been completed after around 2 years.
I mention this, because this MEC's department spent ~$30M USD 'fumigating' schools that were closed during the lockdown.
The criticism has been that the virus doesn't last long enough in sufraces to warrant this waste.
He is unable to account, trying to use 'processes' to shield himself [8].
Funding The Vaccine
Now, back to the vaccine. The SA government is part of the COVAX programme [9].
They 'missed' the deadline to make a deposit twice last year [10].
The Minister of Finance will disagree with this, but for the Solidarity Fund, and other NGOs to step in, is troubling.
There have been discussions from our Treasury, to raise taxes to fund the vaccine [11].
This comes in the midst of irresponsible behaviour by our government, that has contributed to the closure of a lot of companies.
I need not bore the reader with details, but we are broke, our unemployment is rising (even the Statistics SA are stymied from gathering stats, because they're under-funded).
A pause of the vaccine rollout makes medical sense, but given that the doses that we've paid for and received 1 million doses (for a country of 58+million) [12], and have no roll-out plan [13].
So, how is a government that has looted more than enough money to pay for enough doses of the vaccine (less than the $700M USD 'under investigation') to the point of not being able to pay a mere deposit on time, going to fund alternative vaccines?
EDIT: Medical aid/insurers talked about sourcing the vaccines for their members, but government and the public at large seemed to initially be against this move. I don't know what's changed, but the private medical insurers are now helping government with administration instead.
It's a shame that Africa suffers, while it has the resources to alleviate poverty.
If you've read this far, this has been opinions of mine, with some articles to provide context. I'm no reporter. Thanks
[1] I can't find a reference to this anymore, there's just so much noise about the actual looting, that the initial promises are hard to find. I'll update if I find an article or tweet from Presidency.
[13] The health minister was asking health-care practitioners on Twitter last week, to register themselves. There's been overall criticism by HPCs that they're in the dark about doses coming in just a week. This is something that should have started last year already. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-02-03-340...
For anyone reading this, this person is not embellishing or being a complainer as mentioned by some others here. In fact, it is actually much worse than what is described here, the list would be very long if all of it is listed here. Other than the covid corruption, there are a ton of other issues too that makes everything worse (SAA, Eskom, Post Office, broken municipalities, State Capture, Telkom/Icasa, The Guptas/Zuma's/Malema's/Ace/Vbs Saga).
The biggest piece that is broken in our country is our Justice system. None of the evil people will put one foot in jail. Our democracy/gov is a sham. It's just theater at this point. They are all actors, being paid to extract value from us (aka your labour). Their bosses are not in South Africa..
I saw a picture the other day of the Police Minister sitting next to Ace and having a laugh. It is revolting. That person completely raped one of the Provinces and now he sits in parliament making jokes with the person who should lock him up.
Stuff like that. Loads of it. It doesn't feel like a real country anymore at all. At least until some form of justice prevails, until then it's all just lies and corruption.
> The biggest piece that is broken in our country is our Justice system.
I completely disagree. SA faces the same problems that other countries do, just more of them at the same time. Corruption networks are hard to penetrate if it's the government itself that's corrupt. Our institutions aren't as strong as most developed countries.
> Our democracy/gov is a sham
Our democracy works very well. There is a lot of faith in the process and we haven't had an armed group storm the parliament (yet). The electorate is satisfied with the country being run by a corrupt party (57.5% voted ANC). This is unfortunate, but it's also the definition of democracy. People get what they vote for. That process is working very well. You (and I for that matter) don't like the outcome, but we don't represent the majority.
I've had this conversation with my my mother a few times.
America and South Africa are very similar, both historically and their current trajectories. We suffer from the same cultural "deadlocks" which seems nearly impossible to escape since nobody seems willing/mature enough to have a calm conversation about our shortcomings and how to fix it. There are also systemic/administrative governmental deadlocks which frustrate the problem further. A very common scenario between both countries is the huge difference between the rich & poor and between how gov operate vs how people live.
I have also had these same thoughts, and in some ways the USA is today where South Africa was in the late 80's. Time will tell how the USA handles its domestic crisis.
That's a big statement. Even with the election of Biden and the Democratic capture of the Senate, you think the USA has been currently trending in the wrong direction? I harbor little love for the Dems, they could do a lot better on certain issues, however they have to be seen as the better party on climate, stimulus, and COVID, and their election gives me some hope.
Also South African - re the cigarette ban - this was really dodgy. (non-smoker and very anti tobacco in general so this is against my own personal biases)
There have been reports as far back as 2017[0] that Dlamini Zuma, who for all intents and purposes was the decider of this ban, is personally involved in the huge black market for cigarettes and therefore had personal motivations for the ban.
Linking an old news article to show that this isn't a case of retrospectively looking for dirt, though there are plenty of recent ones too.
Another South African here, brought tears to my eyes. I don’t know what citizens can do because these MPs are completely deluded and derelict of their duty.
I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us!
> I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us!
Been there. Watch out for these traps:
a. FPTP (first-past-the-post): this is a truly horrible system. In a FPTP system, the person currently occupying the position (regardless how corrupt) has a huge advantage, and it pushes everything towards a two-party system where there isn't a third option (then, all they need is to give you two equally bad options, and you're screwed for good). It's also easy to introduce "distraction candidates" to just chip away votes from competition.
b. Even two-rounds or instant-runoff "winner takes district" system is not ideal; what happens here is that the small parties are strongly disadvantaged. You _need_ to have a very strong local voice, to win any one district. So for instance a general party that tries to talk to educated youth won't make any dent - they're spread across regions, and likely won't get past 10% anywhere
Proportional systems have huge flaws but really are the lesser evil. Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party). And/or primaries for parties/ to decide the list of candidates & the order in the list, for said candidates.
Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party)
As an example how this is implemented in NL: in elections, all individual candidates are on the ballot, organized by party (yes, the papar ballot is massive -- one of the main criticisms of this system). The candidates are ordered by preference as determined by the party itself, and in general, if a party wins 8 seats during election, that means the top 8 candidates on the ballot take their seat.
The lead candidate (also the face of the party campaign) is ranked #1, and people usually vote for #1 if they only care about voting for a party, not an individual. But people can vote for a non-#1 position (called a preferential vote), and if a specific candidate receives more votes than a pre-determined threshold, they're bumped on the candidate list. This allows voters to influence the resulting body composition not just by party, but by individual member.
Some stats from the last national election are on the Dutch Wikipedia page (but not included in the english translation) [0]:
- 150 seats in total
- 46 candidates have met the preferential vote threshold in total
- 3 candidates could not take seat because their party won 0 seats
- 4 candidates took seat at the expense of a (initially higher-ranked) candidate from the same party
- the remaining 39 candidates would have taken seat anyway because of their original party rank
I frequently find myself defending our constituency based electoral system here in the UK from people who believe proportional representation is fairer. They're right in some ways, but I dread moving towards electing lists of candidates drawn up by central party committees.
Both systems have pro and cons. I am used to vote for pre-defined party lists and a direct mandate for a deligate. Then parties form a coalition, which then chosses a chancelor. Less potential to be messed by populism, the downside is, that the chancelor (head of the executive branch) almost always is the head of the majority party and is alos holding a deligate andate. This blurrs the lines between legislative and executive branch a tad too much if you ask me.
The other extreme is kind of like the US. Pre elections along party lines to choose a candidate that is the directly elected by the electorate. Ver democratic, not blurred lines between government branches. Ignoring stuff like the elctoral collage, the Senate and Gerrymandering, this system is very prone to fall prey to populism.
I guess as long as it works, both solutios are fine. I personnally like the French system a lot. Directly elected Presidents, seperate elections for parliament. I am not judging these systems by the governments it produces, so.
In Australia we use proportional representation to elect the federal senate (upper house). It is used at state level too, in some states.
I used to be of the opinion that it was fairer. I no longer think so. I agree with former PM Paul Keating, who referred to the Senate as "unrepresentative swill"[1]. When I first heard this view, I thought Keating was nuts. What could be better than PR for giving minorities a voice? All you need is portion of votes and you get a seat. Seemed pretty fair to me, and allowed members of minor parties to have a say in the passing of bills into acts.
But that's the problem. Very often a few minor party seats hold the balance of power. The 2 major parties are deadlocked in disagreement over some legislation and whether it becomes law or not falls into the hands of a few senators represented by a minority.
So oftentimes the "uprepresentative swill" get to pass law, or not.
That's not really true. In Australia, plenty of bills get passed with bipartisan support; you just don't hear much about it as it's not newsworthy.
But on issues that are pertinent to each party's ideological position and the expectations of their members/voters, they will take strongly opposed positions.
This is important, so that voters have different options to choose from, and that each party must argue convincingly for their policies when campaigning.
If the parties are in consensus on most things, you end up with something not so different to one-party rule, and possibly endemic corruption.
Exactly. The US system is entirely designed around this. Two legislative bodies and a head of the executive all have to agree. If they can’t, it doesn’t get passed.
Transferable Vote would help the UK system more than PR (which is theoretically more democratic, but in practice moves power further towards party hierarchies and massively promotes political fragmentation). Transferable Vote lets “least worst” candidates win, rather than the current “most-compact minority” which typically disenfranchises 2/3rd of the electorate.
Why not have both? I.e. directly elected MPs and PR.
One way to do this would be to have 90% of the MPs elected in 3-6 member STV constituencies, with every candidate belonging to a party list. Then total the number of 1st preferences each party list got, and allocate the remaining 10% of the seats to the parties to maximalise proportionality (e.g. by d'Hondt). The top-up candidates elected fro each party will by losing candidates from that party who got the highest vote share.
That way, each party will get a number of MPs proportional to its total support, and the individual MPs elected will be the ones the voters most like.
Choosing MPs by party lists means the MPs have to be loyal to the party, not the voters.
The problem in the UK (and other places probably) is lack of representation. IDK what happened to the political establishment, but there are too few politicians supporting what the people believe.
people in support of the current establishment like to smugly pronounce it proof that what the people believe is therefore "wrong" if no educated politicians support it (to the tune of "Reality has a well known liberal bias"); but even if this was the case (I'm sceptical) - it kind of undermines the ability of the political system to support a representative democracy that is actually representative.
that said, maybe there is better representation, and it is just suppressed. As Brexit gained quite a few politicians flipped. That said, why did it have to take so much effort for something supported by about half the population, and even now the best we have if Boris - not a true Brexit supporter, but a flagrant populist who support whatever will get him ahead.
I dread moving towards electing lists of candidates drawn up by central party committees.
They way it works in Norway and Sweden at least is that while you vote for a list of candidates drawn up by the party, you can also select your preferred candidates on that list and as such affect which candidates on the list get seats.
That would be an awful system, although we have a constituency list anyway.
Labour could put up a dead dog in Bootle and would get elected. Conservatives could put the same up in Christchurch and win.
To implement PR,
First, you make the constituencies larger - about 5 times the size now. For example instead of having 4 constituencies on the Wirral you have 1, or 1 in Cornwall instead of the 6 now. Those constitutencies elect more than 1 MP (4 in the Wirral, 6 in Cornwall)
Then you number them in preference order.
This results in the people electing individuals (so preferring a locally popular candidate over a parachuted candidate), but also ensures that if 54% of Cornwall constituency want Tory, 23% want Labour, 19% want Lib Dem, 4% want others, you'd end up with something like
3 Tories
2 Labour
1 Lib Dem
Which is far more representative of the wishes of the people of Cornwall than currently, where 6/6 MPs are Tory on 54% of the vote.
One of the easiest ways to show people that proportional representation is troublesome is to highlight how in past elections it would have given UKIP 83 MPS and even the BNP a dozen or two MPs in the past.
In other words, whilst PR will help you get a representative of your favourite party in, it will also help get representatives of parties who you really don't want in.
After reading up about how SA elections work, I'm a bit confused. It sounds like when you vote you order a set of parties by preference and then PR is used to figure out who won a given area. Once you win that area, the party nominates a set of candidates to represent that area, but this set isn't known at voting time and the order the candidates are chosen is somewhat arbitrary. There's also a case where control of an area is shared, but I'm not entirely sure how that works in the context of PR. Is that roughly correct, or have I missed something?
Initially, it sounded like it had corruption potential built in, but in reality it's not that dissimilar to UK elections. Candidates are selected by their party and we vote for whoever we're given. The difference is that we know who might be elected ahead of time and debates can focus on personal records as well as party agenda.
> Is that roughly correct, or have I missed something?
There's 2 systems. The one you mention is municipal (lowest level), and then there's a purely political-party based one.
Municipal
A ward can elect a political party member, or an independent candidate. The elected candidate who wins, gets a seat in council.
> Once you win that area, the party nominates a set of candidates to represent that area, but this set isn't known at voting time and the order the candidates are chosen is somewhat arbitrary.
Parties also send a candidate-list to the elections body, before the elections. 50% of the council seats are determined by apportioning within these lists. This is meant to be fairer on smaller parties who might otherwise not get enough votes to get a councillor in.
The system is accepted (opinion), and doesn't seem arbitrary as there's rules that allow independent verification.
Provincial and National
These are purely party-list based (perhaps similar to UK then), instead of the 50% split above. Similarly, party lists are known before the elections, and are immutable throughout the 5 years (only get removed if you die or resign from your party, but can't be moved up or down).
There's again some process to determine how many people on the list per party, go to Parliament and the provincial equivalents. So, to your last point; we also know whom we're getting before the elections.
There was a Constitution (supreme) Court ruling last year that requires the next national elections to allow for independent candidates. The sentiment from those interested in our polls, is that the same hybrid municipal system might get chosen.
> Parties also send a candidate-list to the elections body, before the elections. 50% of the council seats are determined by apportioning within these lists. This is meant to be fairer on smaller parties who might otherwise not get enough votes to get a councillor in.
This sounds very similar to the AMS system used in Scotland and Germany.
But would it work? People all over the world have proved to be extremely gullible, a vast majority can be influenced and manipulated, and the worst people running for election are usually the ones who won't hesitate to do that.
Brexit and Trump clearly prove people will vote against their best interests if properly influenced.
Your first sentence can be used by folk who don't share your political stance to support the reverse of your second sentence if, like you, they make assumptions to fit their beliefs.
Clearly they need a wise dictator like you that can tell them where their best interests lie. Obviously the proletariat is too unintelligent to manage that on their own.
Me? oh no I'm just another moron. And I can be influenced as well, I'm just, due to my profession, more aware of how the influencing works, and I think we need awareness that the algos which helped fracture the US in 2 factions are deeply detrimental to society, and yet they keep getting used to boost a few companies' ad revenue.
We accidentally built the paperclip maximizer AI, and it doesn't give a shit about collateral damage.
This is such an arrogant take. Clearly you know what is in people’s best interests and you can’t possibly leave such an important decision to the people themselves.
No I don't. I unfortunately don't have a solution to offer and certainly don't think I am qualified to rule a country, or any part of it. But we need to ensure the technologies which enable this kind of mass manipulation are not taken advantage of, because we've seen the result.
I agree that the government's hard lock-down was excessive, but just one nit-pick: most of what's called 'looting' in the SA press is actually what's technically referred to as 'irregular expenditure', which the Auditor General is very clear does not mean outright fraud but rather referrs to breaches of tendering legislation. This could be anything from over-priced goods (as you mention) to noncompetitive tendering offers. I therefore think 'inefficiency'/'croynism' would be more appropriate term. This means only a certain percentage of the $700M could be reclaimed with perfect efficiency and it's not completely clear that would be enough to cover all vaccine costs.
Good summary, thanks for adding it. One does feel obliged to mention one's "race", as it seems like it's the first thing that someone will assume (wrongly or not) in any conversation in SA. And saying that one shouldn't mention some amount of background really is along the lines of "all lives matter".
So, anyway, agreed with your arguments and thanks for the additional ones I didn't know about. It's important for all South Africans to understand the difference between background and your own future. Many other countries do have this kind of unity, but at historical price of a lot of wars. In SA we essentially avoided war at the cost of multiple identities, and this is something we should draw on for the better.
South Africa is unique in the sense that there is a strong problem of racism and violence by black people against white people. This is something very hard to understand and accept in the current political climate of the USA, but what it really shows is that all people are basically the same and racism has no color.
A super-interesting book this is Jonny Steinberg "A Man of Good Hope". The man in question is a Somali who, when he's being interviewed, does various jobs in the poorer parts of South Africa. And has interesting perspectives on things, and how they look "from below" as it were, as opposed to the more common outsider's impressions from people visiting from richer countries.
>Since its establishment the EFF has made a number of controversial racially or ethnically based statements about a number of South African minority groups. The EFF is widely criticised for inciting and perpetuating racism.[130][98][131] The EFF is known for staging controversial public protests aimed at increasing political support by driving race division and intolerance. Party practices have been defined as "fascist". [132][133][134][135][136][137][138] This approach has proved persuasive to a largely disenfranchised young black youth in South Africa who are mired by poverty, unemployment and inequality, where all minority groups, in particular whites, are singled out by party propaganda as the sole benefactors and drivers of inequality.
The BBC had a fairly objective review of data a few years back[1]
I think at least a few things need to be understood/considered in the context of "farm murders". There's been a growing movement from the EFF/ANC for "expropriation without compensation" of (primarily white-owned) farm land, so apart from any attacks there's a perception that the farmer's control of the land is illegitimate and must be taken by force.[2] Many of these attacks have also been horrifically violent, involving rape, prolonged torture, murder of children and the elderly, etc.[3][4]
'The white minority took our land. Enough is enough' - Julius Malema, EFF President and Commander-in-Chief
Lastly you need to think analogously to other countries - crime tends to be concentrated in poor, dense urban areas. For rural farmers to be murdered at a rate comparable to a dangerous inner city is extremely odd, and if you think the per-capita murder rate is closer to the high end of 150/100k vs. low end of 9/100k, you're talking about a level of ongoing violence seen almost nowhere else on earth.
Then separately there has been a recent/ongoing wave of violence against foreigners[5]:
A refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo told Human Rights Watch: “I was selling clothes on the street when nine South Africans carrying sjamboks and sticks came. They were beating people, shouting ‘You foreigners, go home! We don’t need you here! You are taking our jobs and money!’ I started to run away, but I was beaten, and my two bags of clothes were taken.”
In the US context this is difficult to comprehend since it's "black against black" xenophobia, but there's also the topic of racism against "coloureds" in South Africa. Perhaps one takeaway should be that Americans need to have a less parochial and US-centric understanding of other countries, which often have conflicts that don't smoothly map onto US politics and racial categorizations.
> The BBC had a fairly objective review of data a few years back
This is analogus to me asking for objective data about Afganistan...from the US.
I think you've missed my point entirely, either disregarding my concern for objectivity as invalid or you really do believe commonwealth countries, which are largely homogenous and/or majority white - are the best examples of objective views on a criminal/race driven murder in a majority black, African state.
I will continue nonetheless to ask for objectivity.
The call for expropriation without compensation isn't new nor is it growing. It's a regular part of South african political discourse since pre-1994. Nor is it a new concept, being a regular part of post war administration - see Post World War Japan[1], Korea and Taiwan for US involvement in land reform not dissimilar to South Africas land reform policy and make your own conclusion.
> racism towards coloureds
This comes off as grasping at straws. This would be national news. I would like to see evidence of this please.
> This is analogus to me asking for objective data about Afganistan...from the US.
They said objective review of data, not objective data. I would expect Americans are perfectly capable of objectively reviewing data about Afganistan. If you disagree, please provide evidence.
> disregarding my concern for objectivity as invalid or you really do believe commonwealth countries, which are largely homogenous and/or majority white - are the best examples of objective views on a criminal/race driven murder in a majority black, African state
Why not? Why does an analyst need to be black/African to be "objective"?
By the way, neither ad hominem attacks nor straw man arguments (farm murders) are useful - not only they bring nothing constructive, but encourage degragation of the discourse into emotional name-calling.
I'm very well aware of the history of SA and the suffering of black people. However, I don't think it justifies the attacks some white people experience in SA from some black people.
The "straw man arguments (farm murders)" refers to the fact that the original poster didn't mention farm murders, it was introduced into the conversation in order to attribute a weak argument to someone else in order to attack them on it, aka a straw man.
Now you say "Genocide of the White man is a myth in South Africa" - sure, but who mentioned anything to do with "Genocide"?
Why? The current mainstream narrative bothers me in several ways. First, you can often hear that racism against white people is not racism. Even the term "reverse-racism" was invented for that purpose! Second, Americans have a unique history and relationship between black and white populations, and they try to project the same relationship on other nations (there was a famous article by a black Brit who essentionally said, please don't involve black people in other countries into this).
I would hope HN is one of the few places where we can talk about sensitive issues like these in a civilized way, without microaggressions and trying to look at it objectively. I don't mind downvotes although I prefer rational arguments.
It depends on whether you understand racism as a systemic phenomenon that disenfranchises people, or as one group of people actively disliking another.
Your statement rests on the latter understanding, but that's inadequate for South Africa. There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling. Even unintentional prejudice now from white people ends up affecting black people in South Africa far worse than hatred that just stops at words.
Out of the major developed countries, Britain is leading in vaccine distribution. In terms of infections, British numbers are on par with other European nations when controlled by population.
Where is this negativity coming from? From the outside, it looks like you're doing something right.
In order to promote compliance with the lockdown, we're on a 24/7 diet of bad news.
> British numbers are on par with other European nations when controlled by population.
According to [1], per capita the UK has 2x as many deaths as Germany, 3x as many as Canada and 33x as many as Japan. We've even got 20% more than America.
Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants - but I don't think anyone will be taking the British response as a model in the future.
>According to [1], per capita the UK has 2x as many deaths as Germany, 3x as many as Canada and 33x as many as Japan. We've even got 20% more than America.
Are you cherry picking numbers that you like? Because you're cherry picking numbers that you like. UK is about average compared to developed countries. The per capita deaths are not out of line with the rest of the developed world. Yes, this also means there are countries that did better. There are countries that did worse.
You also ignored the vaccination rate, of which UK is a leading nation.
Why do people feel the need to be negative on this point and single out UK when every country is struggling with COVID. In the US, California has been under a near total lockout and is about the same or worse compared to states like Texas or Florida.
There are no easy answers, and I'm not sure if lockdowns are worth the cost, given the spread that we're seeing.
>Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants
> Are you cherry picking numbers that you like? Because you're cherry picking numbers that you like.
Believe me, I would like nothing better than to report the UK's response had been good.
But if I'd quoted the reported death rates from China and Russia you'd have claimed they were dodgy numbers from dodgy governments; if I'd quoted numbers for Australia and New Zealand you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked remote island nations; if I'd quoted numbers for Taiwan and South Korea you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked countries with SARS experience, and if I'd quoted numbers for Kenya and Iraq you'd have claimed they have young populations and limited testing facilities.
Every single one of those countries has less than half the deaths per capita the UK has, according to that BBC map.
> Why do people feel the need to be negative
What you consider "being negative" is what I call acknowledging factual reality.
When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations, then I look at the numbers and I see that we've got twice the deaths per capita of Ireland and Germany, of course I disagree with you.
>I would like nothing better than to report the UK's response had been good
It's not about UK's response being good or bad. I'm not seeing evidence of any particular COVID strategy working wonders. Especially in the presence of confounding factors like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, age demographics, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), etc. etc. etc.
Are you sure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you just read a number from some internet dashboard?
What is the magic answer to COVID? Masks and Lockdowns? California and New York have been at a mask mandate and full lockdown since March/April. Florida has been largely open throughout the entire time. Texas was somewhere in the middle (though more like Florida). For months Florida and Texas were beaten up by the press while New York and California were praised. I'm looking at their population-controlled case counts and death rates [1][2] and California, Texas and Florida are basically identical. New York has been under lockdown, and their death rate is through the roof most likely because they made one huge mistake in their retirement home policy early on.
It's going to take us years to figure out what happened.
>When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations
Come on, we're looking at the same numbers but that's not the point. You can't just do a straight numbers comparison. What I'm seeing is every country struggling with this in pretty much the same way. I'm sure some are doing something better than others. But AGAIN, hard to figure out what that is given its close to impossible to control for all kinds of variables. Talk to me 5 years after the pandemic is over - we'll have some good answers then.
> What is the magic answer to COVID? Masks and Lockdowns?
I can't claim to have a magic answer, but there are loads of things the government fumbled.
For example, in July the government was claiming to be surprised by asymptomatic carriers even though they'd been well known since the Diamond Princess, right at the start of the pandemic. Perhaps we could have had leadership who were on top of basic, well known facts?
The national track-and-trace system was a shambles - surprising no-one, as it was built by contractors with a long track record of failed projects, overseen by unqualified cronies.
Perhaps back in March, the decision not to covid test patients being discharged from hospitals into nursing homes wasn't such a smart move?
Perhaps we shouldn't have made the bizarre decision to reopen universities for in-person teaching, sending loads of students travelling up and down the country to live in cramped, shared accommodation.
Maybe it wasn't so smart to have that period between lockdown 1 and lockdown 2, when people were allowed to go on holiday to france and spain - then the government would announce a rules change with 24 hours notice, forcing holidaymakers to race back to the UK? That was some truly weird public policy.
Perhaps the government's announcement that they wanted people to stop working from home and go back to working in offices, a few weeks before the had to call for the second lockdown, wasn't such a smart move?
Maybe when we had a second lockdown we shouldn't have announced an end date for it up front, and ended it when the load on hospitals was clearly still rising. Maybe that way we wouldn't be in our third national lockdown right now.
Perhaps we shouldn't have waited nine months before we started testing truck drivers and others entering and leaving the country? And perhaps new arrivals' self isolation should be something more credible than them giving a pinkie promise?
The UK has suffered more deaths—controlled for population—than almost any other country. Overall, management of the pandemic was extremely poorly handled – we had multiple ridiculous decisions, taken purely for political reasons, that resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths and caused further economic damage. In my area, I was personally under four different sets of restrictions in a 12-day period and nobody had a fucking clue what was happening.
Given this, I think there is widespread surprise that the vaccine rollout in the UK has been well-handled – because it has. Many of us were genuinely expecting the other shoe to drop, but fortunately good decisions have been taken and this should be celebrated.
>The UK has suffered more deaths—controlled for population—than almost any other country.
Are there any confounding factors that need to be controlled for? Like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), population age distributions.
Are you sure you're doing apples-to-apples comparison?
I don't think this is fair. There is trust in the British people/buisness, then there is trust in the government
As a _people_ we have worked together to do wonderful things.
The government has done one good thing, and one brilliant thing, and many many stupid things.
The good thing is job support. Its not perfect, but its almost at a par with the wider continent.
The brilliant thing is taking a risk with the various vaccines. Paying for doses regardless of outcome makes sense. The cost of the unused doses/useless doses is nothing compared to the loss of 1 million jobs.
But.
The lifting of the second lockdown. The in inability to monitor isolation, the inability of the tracing infrastructure to predict winter. The sheer vindictiveness of the late third lockdown.
40% of all deaths happened because Boris wanted to "save" Christmas. He couldn't stomach the decision to cancel it, even though it was obvious from october. He dithered, dithered and dithered until there was no choice.
I can forgive the first lockdown lateness, we didn't know. Second lockdown not so much. Taking councils to court to force them to re-open schools even though the local hospitals were running at 190%, un-fucking-forgivable. I say this as someone who is vaguely right of (british) centre.
In short, its not an embarrassment of being british. Nothing of the sort, I just wish that our political class would stop tarnishing our country by being so terminally shit.
We should all celebrate a vaccination program being effectively rolled out. It looks like the UK, including government, has handled this well. Credit where its due, etc.
It's not a surprise that many of us were skeptical given the poor handling of so much else. But the UK government completely fucked its pandemic response overall and 100k people are dead. This is a terrible outcome, and I'm honestly kind of concerned that they'll get away with it in part because there will be so much collective loss of memory in the wake of a successful vaccination rollout.
I find it interesting that you perceive this as a recent phenomenon - rigorous cultural self-criticism almost seems like a culturally British trait from my perspective. Are you suggesting this is new?
The news suggests they are delaying the second dose, or at least strategising.
If there isn't enough vaccine to go around (which there isn't) giving people the recommended 2nd dose is also a gamble.
> The UK’s strategy to delay the second dose of both ... vaccines is so that more people can be vaccinated with their first dose rather than giving a smaller number of people both doses. The hope is that this will save more lives
Do you think the advantage of the 1st vaccine is less than that of the 2nd? i.e that it is better to have 1 person with the recommended 2 vaccines, and another with no vaccinations; versus, two people with only the first vaccination.
And is allowing current strains to spread further because there isn't enough vaccine not a gamble?
I'm also not sure there is a big problem:
"Neither bacteria nor viruses evolve resistance to vaccines as easily as they do to drugs, they wrote. Smallpox vaccine never lost its effectiveness, nor did the vaccines for measles or polio, despite years of use."
There will always be at least some from EU promoters, the vaccine saga is the first to contradict some of the "better together" rhetoric against Brexit.
Just look at the vaccine distribution BS; Factory raids, export laws..
I'm South African, and married to a Brit. We moved to the UK some years ago, and I was really excited about not being angry about politics all the time...
I'll admit the vaccine stuff's been good but a lot of the other stuff has seemed kind of mistimed etc, especially coming from Thailand where I was in April. For instance masks - straight away in Asia, UK took 6 months. Restricting flights and isolating - should have been Feb / Mar when it started which Asia did but brought in 6 months later when it was too late. Hotel quarantine made sense at the start - now we have this weird hotel quarantine 34 countries out of 200 including non quarantine for some countries that have the SA and Brazil variants. Plus no bid contracts for the chums. Could be worse but kinda disorganised. In comparison Thailand was surprisingly coherent and had 1000x less death in spite of being a tourist center with the first case outside China. Before it got going I thought the Brits and US would have it down and SE Asia be 3rd world chaos but it was kinda the other way.
The article's headline says "Confirmed: Guideline that government will only help ‘51%-black-owned companies’ is fake", although on its face this seems to contract the point I understood you to be making. Maybe I've misunderstood something?
The back-story here is that there was a draft policy that got leaked, and there was outrage about it. Given that it wasn't published yet, gov was able to retract it, and say that the draft was fake.
Whether it was genuine or not, remains speculative I suppose.
The eventually settled-upon directives were better than the initial ones, and the article at [0] seems balanced enough (Points 3-7 are most relevant).
Maybe I shouldn't. I mean it will be a huge PR campaign, cover-ups of possible failures and big profits for participating parties. Still probably net positive.
you mean ready like societies in the US, UK, China, France and other aggressors and occupants (so often wearing blue helmets)? Or men in suits sitting in off-shore banks in the West who help loot the continent on nation-state scale (Gabon => France)? Or Germany who still refuses to acknowledge and pay retribution for war crimes in the region? Or did you mean the current EU government with its Erdogan & FRONTEX firewall that ensures we keep those refugees in concentration camps during a pandemic.
It provides context on the financial and preparation (or lack thereof), which can be of value when someone reads them.
> I always wondered why we South Africans think we are so special
Respectfully, if news about Burundi appears on a website that's read by at least 40% North Americans [0], who might not have interesting context about some back-story on Burundi, would such person think "they're special" when offering such details?
> Especially the South Africans who left after the transition to a democracy
Well, I've missed work for almost 2 weeks because we've been burying family members, some in the Health Department, who have been complaining about the lack of PPE.
You can understand my anxiety when we were hopeful that a vaccine could be rolled out to protect front-line workers, but now it could be a few more months before we're able to procure the alternatives (I'm assuming the mRNA ones).
No. Its still irrelevant to the fact that the Oxford vaccine is probably ineffective to the South African strain. The post is more South African whining rather than the discussion at hand.
First, in this case, relevance is not binary. Second, even if it was 100% unrelated, it's still interesting to know the context first hand rather from a fellow HN-er as opposed to a more general view from a journalist who is limited in what they can say.
As an American, I was very interested to hear a critical perspective. It's difficult for foreigners to understand the significance of a news story in isolation, so having someone explain is very helpful.
The typical internet South African tends to post extremely negative news about the country. Some of them haven't lived here in many years after immigrating to Australia or some place just as "racially homogenous".
We are a new country only truly existing since 1994. So we need to go through the growing pains. The same pains any other country has to go through. But certain members of internet South Africa believes that these pains are due to our leaders being black rather than we are just a new country.
Hi, I'm very-invested in our country, and I'm involved in social activism that helps to step in where our country lacks (as will always be the case around the world).
I also mentioned in the post, that I'm an African black, precisely because of the presumption that when someone provides information about our country's failings; they must be white people from the pre-1994 days.
I don't understand why you keep mentioning people who left South Africa, as I'm not one; and you'd have noted from my post, and its response to you.
> But certain members of internet South Africa believes that these pains are due to our leaders being black rather than we are just a new country
Perhaps this isn't the forum, but I'd really like to understand how you're arriving at this conclusion.
Sure, I can accept that my post isn't relevant to the point that you've taken from the article, that the O-AZ vaccine doesn't work against the strain that we're experiencing.
Would you rather censor me (when we don't know each other) under the unproven assumption that I'm a whiner?
Unfortunately (you must have observed, particularly in the case of South Africa) it is not easy to accept that someone is who they say they are on the Internet. The DA is accused of running hundreds of fake accounts on twitter, and we all know about Bell Pottinger.
Your question, "would you rather censor me" is the hope that I cling to, because it sounds more reasonable than troll to me.
> We are a new country only truly existing since 1994.
This is a risible excuse. SA had the infra structure, resources, processes and, thanks to Mandela, the philosophy for success in hand. Subsequent leaders threw all this in the bin in pursuit of completely visible corruption and cultural despotism and kleptocracy.
I don't think "new country" and "growing pains" is a valid excuse for the absolute humanitarian disaster that has been allowed to happen in SA under the current government. And no we don't think it's because they're "black", it's because they're incompetent and evil, and care more about enriching themselves than helping their countrymen.
South Africans have adopted an outrage persona that's hard to ignore.
We're serial complainers. Maybe it's the ever-present cloud of former british colonial rule and their custom of complaining ad nauseum.
Yes, we are corrupt. Yes, we made absolutely brain dead decisions. Yes, we are headed into a black whole of a failed state (experiment?)
But the bullshit pulled by AZ isn't surprising - given how little regard most of the world has for the continent and they should be called out for it. The vaccine wasn't a generous donation.
Note that AstraZeneca's agreement with Oxford is that it will manufacture the vaccine on an at cost basis for as long as the pandemic lasts (and no sooner than July 2021).
While it's not a donation, it's also not being sold for a profit; they may be able to make a profit in the future.
How does that square with AZ charging SA "nearly 2.5 times higher than most European countries"?[0][1]
The Guardian claims that an official claimed that they were told by AZ that the discrepancy is due to European countries having paid for R&D, but anybody in the chain could have been lying.
> How does that square with AZ charging SA "nearly 2.5 times higher than most European countries"?[0][1]
At least you are getting it. We Europeans seem to have pre-funded production and now it turns out much of it is shipped to higher-paying customers first, and we must wait until "production issues" are solved.
An issue is that R&D is a fixed cost rather than a variable cost, so determining how the R&D costs are to be split among AZ's customers is pretty hard and potentially prone to abuse. Are they to be split among all expected customers before the pandemic ends? All expected customers during the lifetime of the vaccine? During the lifetime of this family of vaccines?
Given that apparently it makes up the majority of the price, it's quite an important detail.
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There's some important details not mentioned in the article, which make this more of an emergency than a reader of just the article will notice.
Allow me to paint some back story, but the summary is this:
- We (our country) got 1 million doses of this vaccine last week, being ill-prepared and flustered to get our act together
- These doses expire in April, we do not have a roll-out strategy because politicians played politics (I'll explain below)
- We are broke, and the trust between people and gov is diminishing quickly
Initial Lockdown (March 2020)
Many people were initially positive when our first lockdown started. The President set up a "Solidarity Fund" [0], with initial donations of ~$70m USD (R1 billion) from a few wealthy families in the country.
The government 'diverted' funds to the PPE roll out, and the President expressly said that there wouldn't be looting [1] of funds.
The government put us in a quasi-martial-law with a committee called the NCCC [2] (name can be found in the link), parts of which have been taken to court, because of arbitrary laws/rules, and a very apparent power-grab by the ruling/governing party. Some of the bizzare things that came out of this NCCC:
- A ban on cigarette sales, not substantiated by anything scientific at the time. They lost the court battle, but true to form, are appealing [3].
- Regulations on sales of winter clothes. Arbitrarily defining the details of clothes that can be bought or not, what aisles to be used. It was as ridiculous as talking about crop tops and tights [4].
- Instituting racist policies to only help certain businesses [5]. I feel obliged to say that I'm an African black, and I agree with the sentiment that this was unConstitutional, as we all should enjoy the same rights. The gist of this was that the President said something like "this is a chance to redistribute wealth by only supporting black businesses".
The above has been met with criticism, and has eroded trust.
PPE Looting/Corruption
Now, one only needs to search for "PPE Corruption South Africa" to get stories about articles almost-daily.
- Premiers (leaders of provinces) have been implicated or accused
- President's spokesperson has been suspended, and has failed to submit her financial interests [6]
- As of October 2020, at least $700M USD is under investigation for being looted for PPE [7]. Politically connected people were setting up companies, selling 100ml of sanitisers for up to $3000 USD, all sorts of horrors.
Anecdotally, one of the provincial ministers (MEC) of education, has been up in arms against a white-owned/run trade union called Solidariteit, for deciding to build their own techno-university with private funds.
The university was to cost ~$20M USD, and has been completed after around 2 years.
I mention this, because this MEC's department spent ~$30M USD 'fumigating' schools that were closed during the lockdown.
The criticism has been that the virus doesn't last long enough in sufraces to warrant this waste. He is unable to account, trying to use 'processes' to shield himself [8].
Funding The Vaccine
Now, back to the vaccine. The SA government is part of the COVAX programme [9]. They 'missed' the deadline to make a deposit twice last year [10]. The Minister of Finance will disagree with this, but for the Solidarity Fund, and other NGOs to step in, is troubling.
There have been discussions from our Treasury, to raise taxes to fund the vaccine [11]. This comes in the midst of irresponsible behaviour by our government, that has contributed to the closure of a lot of companies.
I need not bore the reader with details, but we are broke, our unemployment is rising (even the Statistics SA are stymied from gathering stats, because they're under-funded).
A pause of the vaccine rollout makes medical sense, but given that the doses that we've paid for and received 1 million doses (for a country of 58+million) [12], and have no roll-out plan [13].
So, how is a government that has looted more than enough money to pay for enough doses of the vaccine (less than the $700M USD 'under investigation') to the point of not being able to pay a mere deposit on time, going to fund alternative vaccines?
EDIT: Medical aid/insurers talked about sourcing the vaccines for their members, but government and the public at large seemed to initially be against this move. I don't know what's changed, but the private medical insurers are now helping government with administration instead.
It's a shame that Africa suffers, while it has the resources to alleviate poverty.
If you've read this far, this has been opinions of mine, with some articles to provide context. I'm no reporter. Thanks
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[0] https://solidarityfund.co.za/
[1] I can't find a reference to this anymore, there's just so much noise about the actual looting, that the initial promises are hard to find. I'll update if I find an article or tweet from Presidency.
[2] https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/govts-coronav...
[3] https://businesstech.co.za/news/lifestyle/459136/governments...
[4] https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-05-14-g...
[5] https://citizen.co.za/business/2259481/confirmed-guideline-t...
[6] https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/khusela-diko-...
[7] https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/442058/r10-5-bill...
[8] https://twitter.com/SundayTimesZA/status/1355806487650689024
[9] https://www.who.int/initiatives/act-accelerator/covax
[10] https://businesstech.co.za/news/trending/457668/south-africa...
[11] https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/461548/south-afri...
[12] https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-02-08-south-afr...
[13] The health minister was asking health-care practitioners on Twitter last week, to register themselves. There's been overall criticism by HPCs that they're in the dark about doses coming in just a week. This is something that should have started last year already. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-02-03-340...