Government must speed-up its vaccinations – health workers

Health workers have called on the government to speed up its vaccination programme, which they feel is going at a slow pace while their exposure to Covid-19 remains high.

On Thursday, hundreds of health workers queued at the Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital in Johannesburg to be inoculated as part of the government’s first phase of the vaccination programme.

While the health workers did not complain about the efficiency of the vaccination at the hospital, they complained about the time they had spent waiting for the jab.

Siphiwo Pino, who works for Gauteng Emergency Management, said the wait had been too long.

“As frontline workers, we felt that the vaccination programme is very slow. We’ve been working for months without vaccination while the programme had already been launched.

“It is scary waking up in the morning and preparing to go to work, knowing the risk you will face and the implication it has on your life. I watch news every day and the numbers of daily vaccinations are too low. At least the government should go to 40,000 a day,” Pino said.

Nomsa Dlamini, a nurse at the Brackenhurst Clinic who registered two weeks ago, said she received her voucher pin yesterday.

“It was stressful working in an environment where there is a high possibility that people could be infected. I was also worried that I could be infected. Waiting for the vaccine was quite stressful. Everything was happening so fast with the pandemic. People were dying every day; we expected government to roll out the vaccine at a quicker rate. The government must speed up its programme,” Dlamini said.

Health minister Zweli Mkhize visited Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital on Thursday to assess the progress of the vaccination rollout.

The hospital can vaccinate up to 40 people at a given time.

Managers at the centre said the delays in vaccinating people was caused by  a lot of the workers arriving at the facility without vouchers.

This means they had to be registered first, sign an electronic consent and vouchers are created. They  then go through an assessment before they get into the hall where they receive the vaccine. After receiving the jab, the person has to wait for about 15 minutes to be monitored to establish they are not having any reaction to the vaccine.