Pressure to jab teachers on time

THE Western Cape will have the mammoth task of vaccinating more than 55 000 teachers and employees in the education sector over two weeks, starting on Wednesday.

Minister for Basic Education Angie Motshekga, in a media briefing yesterday, announced that a vaccination programme for the education sector would target 582 000 workers nationally and that schools would remain open until July 8.

Dr Granville Whittle, the acting head of department, said the Western Cape would have 29 vaccination sites across the province’s six disticts which would administer 3 800 jabs a day.

The metro, believed to have only two sites, is expected to deliver 1040 vaccines a day which would take 22 days to complete, missing the cut-off date by eight days.

Western Cape has the second highest number of new infections, 1541, in a 24-hour period with the most new infections in Gauteng at 8403.

By Friday, the number of pupils with Covid-19 stood at 546, an increase of 232 cases since the department’s last update on Tuesday. The number of cases among school staff stood at 148 as of June 14 and will only be updated tomorrow afternoon.

Motshekga said there were more than 25 000 schools in the country and closing them could result in an academic disaster. But they would continue to monitor the situation on a weekly basis, and treat each school on a case-by-case basis.

She said the department would stick to its initial decision to allow all primary school pupils to return to school on July 26, for the resumption of the third term.

Yesterday, MEC for Education Debbie Schafer said her department along with the provincial health department had been making extensive preparations before the announcement.

“The Department of Health has identified specific vaccination sites for the sector and districts will communicate the arrangements directly to our schools as to when they will need to go to their designated sites,” she said.

The departments of health and education did not respond to questions on the allocation of doses, details of vaccination sites and how health-care workers will be allocated to service the education sector and the vaccination of the elderly.

Western Cape Education Department said details of the programme would only be announced this week.

Schafer spokesperson Kerry Mauchline said: “There is much work to finish now that we have the parameters laid out by the national minister.

Unions and school governing bodies welcomed the programme but cautioned that extreme dedication and political will was needed to execute the mammoth task in a short time.

Education expert at the University of Stellenbosch Professor Nuraan Davids said while it was possible to undertake the vaccination programme in the time frames provided, proper leadership was required.

“It is entirely possible if there is political will and the structures in place to drive this. And if they can pull this off it can prove that the country can accelerate the broader vaccination programme which has been a little lackluster,” she said.

“With the issue of school closures, I have always maintained that in the South African context it is best to keep kids in school where they have access to sanitation and other facilities and away from some conditions they are faced with at home.

“The more you disrupt education and the school system, the harder it is to get those learners back in. There are hundreds of scholars from last year who have not returned to the school system and may never do so due to the socio-economic circumstances.”

Dr Jaco Deacon from the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools said the lessons learnt from previous vaccination programmes like Sisonke should provide an advantage for the department.

“Here we have highly organised, unionised members, we know where they are, who they are and when to find them during the day and there is no registration necessary,” he said.

“It is still a huge task but I think it can be pulled off with the right leadership. So we will encourage our SGB members to make vehicles available to transport staff to these centres to make it easier for them.

“The two-week time frame might be extended to accommodate anyone left but I think the rationale is to give staff those two weeks off during the holiday to recover if there are any symptoms and return in the new term ready, well-rested and vaccinated.”

National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa’s Basil Manuel said: “The plans look realistic and while it might be a tough task, I think it can work. You can have clusters of workers being called to centres on different days.

“If the department of health says they can provide the manpower then it should work. We don’t want to be negative as it encourages naysayers and anti-vaxxers. Our recent survey showed that 75% of our teachers said they would take the vaccines, 15% were on the fence and 10% said no, so we want to target that 15% to encourage them to get the vaccine by having confidence in the system.”

But the general secretary of the Educators Union of South Africa, Siphiwe Mpungose, said they were not convinced the department could pull off the vaccination programme.

“Incompetence and corruption is rife in the national government and we, therefore, are not confident that this task will be done properly,” he said.

“We don’t even have clarity on whether these 280 000 additional doses don’t come from the contaminated batch. In actual fact we do not trust J&J vaccines. If it was Pfizer we may have a different opinion but teachers must decide for themselves. But as a union we are very much reluctant especially with the sudden availability of these doses.”

Mpungose said they also disagreed with the department’s views to keep schools open during the third wave.

“This third wave is making schools epicentres and that the best thing to do would be to close until the peak has passed,” he said.

The ANC’s shadow MEC for Education in the Western Cape Khalid Sayed said the rollout of the vaccination programme was a good way to ensure schools stay open.