Waiting for the sms from the vaccine authority seems rather like standing in an orderly queue for a lifeboat on the Titanic. Admirable, but unwise.

Completing the process at the DisChem headquarters in Midrand took five hours.

Sure it was a Ben Hur, but without exception every Dischem employee I encountered – from the guard who showed us our place in the queue to director Stan Gates who walked into the “recovery room” to ask recipients how things were progressing  – was obviously bent on being helpful.

It was one of the seminal new South African experiences: along with the first democratic election in 1994 and hosting the Football Word Cup in 2010.

We were in this fight against COVID together, and determined to beat the lurgy.

On social media I learn that many friends have received their vaccine must quicker and more efficiently. Good luck, I say to them. We are in this fight together.

It seems that all of us now have to wait 42 days to get the second jab.

There is a bid to tell us this is the most efficacious application of the vaccine. I don’t believe it.

We are being made to wait so that more people can get the first dose of the limited supplies of  vaccine available.

Remember the people now telling us about the need to wait are the same people whe were telling us 14 months ago that we did not need masks because they were afraid we would gobble up the available masks to the detriment of the health workers.

So wait I will.

Not at all sure where I will go to get the second jab. It would be great to avoid the five-hour process at GenChem, even if this means missing another chance to see  my new-found pandemic friends.

Discovery boss Adrian Gore has written a letter saying members should try the sites being set up by his medical aid society.

He seems confident there will be enough Pfizer to dispense the second injections.

From his mouth to God’s ear!

President Cyril Ramaphosa just tightened a band of cold steel around my testicles – metaphorically speaking, of course – telling us that South Africa would chuck out two million does of Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

He’s blaming a contamination scare at its source in the the United States.

To his credit, Ramaphosa acted swiftly, decisively and courageously locking down South Africa early on in the pandemic.

However his government’s record in dispensing the vaccine this year as been less than impressive. Plainly speaking it has been marked by dithering and, by all accounts, corruption.

That is the antithesis of the British experience where Boris Johnson fiddled at the start of the pandemic, costing thousands of lives, but has done a sterling job of getting vaccine into Britons’ arms.

Could the G7 come to our aid?

At their summit in Cornwall last weekend, the leaders of Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy committed themselves to providing a billion doses of vaccine to poorer countries within the year.

Critics say this is a drop in the ocean for the developing world that needs at least ten times that amount.

We can talk about lifting the intellectually property rights to allow vaccine to be manufactured in South Africa, Senegal and other countries ready and able to do it.

If successful, that would be months away.

We need a quicker solution if we are to achieve the much vaunted herd mentality and avoid the plethora of variants to which we no longer may attach a national appellation.

Away with the political correctness and down with the blame game, I say with unashamed selfishness as I prepare to line up for my second dose.

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Like the rest of the world caught up in the pandemic, Africa waits impatiently for a vaccine.

Baffling the experts, Africa has had comparatively low numbers of infections.

These infections are starting to increase, but thus far Africa accounts for just over two million of the more than 60 million cases worldwide.

Medical experts say there has been an increase in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria as the winter weather closes in.

South Africa, with more than 502000 infections and over 21 000 deaths tops the continental COVID list.

These experts fear it will later next year and perhaps even 2022 before Africa sees widespread distribution of vaccines.

It is unlikely, they say, that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which are currently the frontrunners in the northern hemisphere, will be distributed in Africa.

Cost is not the chief obstacle.

According to the International Vaccine Access Centre at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,  the storage and transportation of the vaccine are the chief obstacles.

The Pfizer vaccine has to be kept at minus 80 degrees.

Distributing it requires special refrigerated storage facilities and refrigerated aircraft and vehicles to move it around.

Africa requires a more hardy medication that does not require such expensive care.

There is also a question of safety.

Fourteen years ago Pfizer had to pay compensation to the 11 families in Nigeria’s Kano state who lost children in tests on the anti meningitis vaccine Travan.

African nations responded angrily early in the pandemic to French doctors suggesting Africans would be good subjects for testing a COVID vaccine.

The movement calling itself Africans Are Not Lab Rats has silenced similar suggestions.

However it is undeniable that if a vaccine is be effective in Africa, it needs to be tested here..

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Pfizer the American drug maker and its German partner BioNTech report that their COVID 19 vaccine is 90% effective.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla calls this a game changer.

Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases – who is probably the most trusted doctor in America – says this extraordinarily good news.

We know that people who had shots of the vaccine three weeks apart showed a 90% rate of immunity over those taking the placebo.

Doctors were saying the best they could hope for was 60%-70% effectiveness.

According to Food and Drug Administration guidelines, Pfizer has not filed for emergency use for two months after the test to be sure of the vaccine’s safety.

This means the vaccine should be available in the third week of this month.

Bourla says there will be 50 million doses available globally by the end of this year.

At least 1,3 billion doses will be available in 2021.

It is not yet clear if the vaccine will obviate severe cases of COVID that require hospitalisation and could result in death.

Neither is it certain whether persons vaccinated will not show symptoms of COVID.

Most importantly, Pfizer cannot say how long the vaccine will be effective for.

Nevertheless stock exchanges around the world are preparing for record breaking openings today as sectors like airlines tourism and others for which COVID was an existential threat begin to recover.

The old maxim is that good news comes in threes.

The vaccine is the second heartening item following Joe Biden’s decisive US Presidential election win last weekend.

Dare we hope that the third will be Donald Trump being persuaded by the growing band of family members urging him to face reality and make a dignified departure?

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