The first shipment of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, landed in South Africa on 1 February. This was a moment of brilliant hope. However, a shameful announcement happened then, too: undocumented immigrants living inside South Africa would be barred from receiving the vaccine, Dr. Zweli Mkhize, the health minister revealed.
South Africa´s health minister promptly walked back his words in the face of a furious reaction from human rights advocates.
Even before the Emirates cargo plane carrying the first batch of vaccines docked at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport, some of us were already expecting this deplorable attitude from South Africa´s government.
A disturbing study carried by academics from the Witwatersrand University School of Public Health revealed in December 2020 that there are rampant xenophobia and discriminatory practices by some nurses and doctors towards millions of migrants seeking hospital care in South Africa. One of the study´s most damning findings was that “19.2% of health care providers reported that they had witnessed discrimination against migrants, while 20.0% reported differential treatment of migrant patients.”
These are the very people tasked with keeping South Africa and its inhabitants disease-free.
Xenophobia towards foreign Africans is widespread in South Africa beyond the healthcare sector. A cursory glance of South Africa´s lively Twitter community one stumbles daily hateful comments like: “Well there’s no surprise in this, (foreigners) they are already benefiting from Healthcare, education and currently occupy jobs which our citizens can do. They hijack buildings.”
The arrival of AstraZeneca vaccines, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, places South Africa among the 9 relatively wealthy, fastest, and pace-setter African countries that are on track to vaccinate the majority of their populations by mid-2022.
However, South Africa is a medically rich country surrounded by a bevy of poorer neighbors like Zimbabwe. These are neighbors so woefully under-prepared that, relying on donor goodwill, they will not vaccinate the majority of their populations until 2024. Yet South Africa hosts some of the highest numbers of refugees in the world. It is thought 1 to 3 million Zimbabwe refugees/migrants alone are in South Africa for the sake of accessing medicine or food. The precise number is not known. These are the category of residents of South Africa about which the medical xenophobia study reveals, “(some) nurses surveyed feel that migrants should go back to their home countries for health care, and migrants only came to SA for health care.”
It doesn’t help cool tempers that thousands of Zimbabweans yearly regularly flow across porous borders to access free public clinics in South Africa. Seeing the hopelessness of their country´s ruined public hospitals, they´ll surely sneak under the wire fence to join vaccine queues in South Africa. It is human nature. This behavior has been documented as far away as the USA where non-residents and foreigners are traveling to Florida to sneak into vaccine queues.
As wealthier South Africa begins to vaccinate its population, the scramble for the vaccine will outstrip supply and xenophobic feelings will emerge. Bigoted debates will flow along these lines: who is South African (citizen or migrant)? And who deserves ´our´ vaccine?
There is a precedent of past xenophobic hostility and deaths pitting South Africans versus migrants living inside the country and her neighbors. For example, at Christmas, a diplomatic border tiff between Zimbabwe and South Africa saw 15 travelers die in passport queues; in January, South Africa deployed army boats, helicopters, and electric fences to stem the flow of Zimbabwe migrants.
Yet, a virus does not discriminate in who it infects or spares. A vaccine knows no passport nor citizenship document. The virus doesn’t give a damn about your ID or your passport. No one with a reasonable mind wants the possibility of unvaccinated undocumented migrants roaming around and later becoming a petri dish that enables viral variations.
South Africa, as an island, cannot overcome the pandemic until her poorer neighbors get help too. These facts are bigger than bigoted nationalism.
Image credit: David Mark