Let’s all get vaccinated against Covid-19

This week we take a temporary break from our celebration of the centenary of the Communist Party of China and how it has defied Western economic, agricultural, nutritional, development, and military pundit predictions. Today, we would have talked about China and its so-called land grabs in Africa. But we will discuss that next week.

We wanted to take a break to remind our fellow citizens that Covid-19 is very much here (again). And it is serious, vicious, and fatal. All over, the Covid-19 quarantine and treatment arenas are almost full again.

This time oxygen and other emergency requirements seem to be adequate in Malawi. However, people are dying. Some die days after coming to the treatment centres. Some die just hours after being brought to treatment centres. The latter, to use crude medical language, are mostly brought in dead or, to use crude political language, come dead on arrival. Some, actually most, get treated, get well, and are discharged to go into the world and tell their stories.

Governments all over the world have not hidden the fact that Covid-19 won’t be contained until all people, or at least 70 to 80 percent of the world 8 billion-strong population, have been vaccinated. Addressing attitudes to vaccination is critical and should not be left to governments alone.

As President Lazarus, some call him Lazarous, Chakwera indicated in his BBC Hard Talk interview, only 2.0 percent of Malawians had been fully vaccinated before the new doses of Covid-19vaccines were brought to Malawi.

Malawi’s policy on vaccines has changed, the President informed the world through the BBC Hard Talk interview, from relying on administering the two-dose AstraZeneca vaccine to using multiple vaccines.

Malawi now has Johnson and Johnson single dose vaccines. Soon, by September 2021, we will have more vaccines. These will include the Pfizer double dose vaccine. 

Perhaps, Malawi will not be caught in Covid-19 vaccine geopolitics. Before identification of the highly transmissible delta and English/South African coronavirus variants, the Western media was awash with narratives to the extent that Russian and Chinese vaccines were weaker than those produced in the USA and Europe. Sad to say that most of the narratives, typical of cold-war journalism, were based on mere suspicion, and political rather than medical sources or evidence.

From our consumption of international media, we have learnt that there is as yet no vaccine that provides virus-tight guarantee against infection by new variants.

Let us get vaccinated. Today. With the Johnson & Johnson vaccine you will only get one jab. This is only for those who have not received their first AstraZeneca or any other vaccine injection.

If you already received both AstraZeneca jabs, you are fully vaccinated. If you have received one Johnson and Johnson vaccination, you are fully vaccinated.  If you already got full doses of Sputnik V, Pfizer, or SinoVac, you are fully vaccinated. 

But if you only got one AstraZeneca, injection, you are not fully vaccinated. Wait for your second dose of AstraZeneca. Unless health and ‘covidologists’ recommend it, avoid missing vaccines deliberately.

However, by all means let’s get vaccinated to get to that critical threshold to guarantee us, Malawians, and the world population, the necessary herd immunity.

1.   Getting vaccinated in good time, that is, before one gets infected with the Coronavirus, provides a chance that one will not get very ill when one gets infected. Data from across the world indicates 85% of fully vaccinated adults are not getting critically ill from Covid-19.

2.   Getting vaccinated reduces need of wearing masks. In some European countries, “maskless and socially undistanced”, meetings between those fully vaccinated are being allowed.  So are maskless airport movements among the fully vaccinated.

3.   Getting fully vaccinated gives one psychological innocence that one is not a transceiver of Covid-19

Forget about those false stories about vaccinated people turning into phantasmagorical multi-headed beasts. Forget about Bill Gates and other rich people wanting to control and eliminate Africans because if they wanted they could do so through the many items we import, including malaria drugs, perfumes, and kaunjika garments and kaunjika cars. If non-African countries wanted to wipe Africans out of the earth, they could do so militarily. Within a month the Russian or US army can eliminate everybody from Africa and the world. So, don’t waste precious vaccination time.

Forget about vaccines being the work of Satan, either, because doing so is tantamount to pampering the devil, ‘giving him buttocks, kumpatsa matako Satana’. 

Forget about us being fully protected by God’s armour.  God did not hate those who are dying of Covid-19.

Now listen carefully. In Israel, about 70 percent of Biblical God’s people have been vaccinated. Need a translation? 

M’dziko la Israeli, kwawo kwa Yesuko, kuli Yerusalemuko, ku Yudeyako, kwawo kwa ana enieni a Yahweh, Mulungu, pafupifupi anthu 7 mwa anthu 10 alionse abaitsa kale katemere wa Kovidi.