The Anthony Fauci spectacle before the US Senate is a reminder that in South Africa, as yet, there has been no attempt at Covid accountability, says Jaundiced Eye columnist William Saunderson-Meyer.
Saunderson-Meyer writes:
In 2022, Dr Anthony Fauci described himself as the world’s “most famous and talked-about person”. The “squealing and screaming and clapping” from his fans was, in his mind, proof that he had become a much-needed “symbol of integrity and truth” during the dark days of the Covid pandemic.
Modesty aside, he was not far wrong about the first assertion. On the second, however, the hubris is breathtaking. Few people – not even the medically eccentric Robert F Kennedy Jr – have done more damage to the injunction to “follow the science” than the man who last week invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before a US Senate committee investigating the pandemic response.
Although President Joe Biden granted Fauci an extraordinarily broad pre-emptive pardon, it does not cover his conduct before the Senate. Fauci, much diminished not only in reputation but also in bearing, may yet face prosecution for contempt of Congress. However, in today’s starkly divided America, the Senate process and any prosecution that may follow will have less to do with accountability than with partisan theatre.
Prising out the truth about Covid-19 is not a uniquely American problem. The other major attempt to do so, in the UK, has been blunted by the reluctance of the medical and political establishment to look too closely.
The Hallett Inquiry, announced in 2021 and set to drip-feed reports well into 2027, has so far been deeply unsatisfactory. Above all, it has failed to subject to sustained scrutiny the institutional groupthink that defined Britain’s pandemic response. Instead, it has largely accepted the scientific establishment’s baseline assumptions without adequately interrogating weaknesses in research and methodology, over-extrapolations and apocalyptic “worst-case” models that drove public angst and government policy.
But while the US and Britain may be pursuing accountability badly, South Africa has not pursued it at all.
It should also be said at the outset that – contrary to the conspiracy theorists of social media – most of the scientists, officials, politicians and public intellectuals who drove the pandemic response were driven not by malice, but by a climate of fear, misguided zeal and institutional hubris.
Vaccines are a major medical triumph and, especially for the elderly and medically vulnerable, greatly reduced the risk of severe illness and death. The failure came when panic and arrogance transformed a targeted medical tool into an absolutist dogma.
This was a dogma that decreed everyone, regardless of risk profile, required mandatory vaccination, accompanied by total societal shutdown, the policing of physical contact, and the ruthless suppression of contrary opinions.
Everyone understands that an emergency demands action, and that decisions taken at speed on fragmentary evidence will inevitably produce mistakes. Unfortunately, the safeguards against such mistakes – intellectual humility, robust public debate and a traditional reluctance to allow the state to trample individual rights – are particularly frail in South Africa.
An institutional overconfidence, which often slips into outright dishonesty and authoritarian over-reach, is hardly unique to South Africa. But our shallow democratic roots, entrenched deference to authority, and a weak culture of critical scrutiny, make us unusually susceptible to excess.
During the pandemic, one of the results was a miscellany of irrational regulations, most infamously, the bans on the sale of open-toed sandals and hot rotisserie chickens, enforced with sometimes lethal zeal. The economy contracted sharply, millions lost their livelihoods, schooling was devastated, routine healthcare was disrupted, hunger, child malnutrition and mental isolation deepened, and public trust in government and medical authority was badly corroded.
A measure of the prevailing authoritarian zeitgeist was the mobilisation of the police and military. Police, backed by some 70 000 soldiers, mounted roadblocks, enforced curfews, carried out house-to-house searches for tobacco and alcohol, deployed water cannons against queueing shoppers, and arrested solitary dog walkers and lone sunbathers.
By May 2020 already, Parliament was expressing alarm over at least 10 alleged deaths resulting from heavy-handed police action. And when the Pretoria High Court issued a strong supervisory order to curb security-force brutality, the government appealed against the section ordering it to institute accountability mechanisms.
No surprise, then, that we had our own, locally minted Faucis. These public figures, largely unchallenged, got swept up in the hysteria of the moment.
Among them was Professor Pierre de Vos, holder of the Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance at the University of Cape Town (UCT), who was quick to argue that the state had both the right and the duty to compel vaccination. When resistance persisted rather than abated, De Vos’s proposed remedies became progressively more coercive.
De Vos portrayed virtually any form of vaccine scepticism as a manifestation of ignorance, superstition, irrational fear and narrow self-interest. The decision not to be vaccinated, he argued, was potentially a “deadly threat” to others, and to respond with indirect coercion through the law was a “reasonable and justifiable” limitation of individual human rights.
De Vos was soon involved in a UCT campaign to make vaccination mandatory on the campus. Dismissing opponents as “unhinged anti-vaxxers” or “dishonest critics”, he insisted that this would constitutionally be “not particularly controversial”.
Indeed, such a compulsion of healthy university staff and students would be no different from forcibly taking blood or DNA samples from criminals, the compulsory HIV tests of alleged sex offenders, and the court-ordered emergency blood transfusions given to children over the religious objections of their parents.
After the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration upheld the dismissal of an employee who refused vaccination, De Vos lauded the ruling as a warning that “doing your own research” and embracing contrarian claims could cost you your livelihood.
He did so despite conceding that new variants had substantially weakened vaccination protection, a development that, he acknowledged, might affect the fairness of such dismissals. And, in fact, around 300 people lost their jobs in this fashion, with the appeals and counter-appeals still wending their way through the legal system.
De Vos was not alone in advocating what amounted to an erosion of constitutional rights.
Professor Keymanthri Moodley, director of Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Medical Ethics & Law, argued in a journal article that civil-liberties objections were being voiced “loudly and abrasively”, but that she had “no doubt” mandates were ethically justifiable. It was, she wrote, “no longer a matter of whether” they should be introduced, but when.
Retired Constitutional Court judge Edwin Cameron compared “hard-core anti-vaxxers” to Aids denialists, and urged that mandates be “made law”. He stressed that he did not envisage armed officials administering injections, but rather a legal obligation backed by consequences, akin to compulsory seatbelt use.
While some of South Africa’s most prominent jurists and ethicists were found wanting, several of our most internationally-respected medical academics, while supportive of vaccinations, did see the dangers, and did hold the line against institutional pressure, at great personal and professional risk.
In webinars I hosted for MedicalBrief with UCT infectious-disease researcher Robin Wood, he warned repeatedly that global panic was driving officials to cherry-pick apocalyptic models, suppress uncertainty, and herd clinicians and policy makers to a sometimes flawed consensus by appointing only the already persuaded as advisers.
His bleakest prediction, that this would leave the world less able to handle the next pandemic, was prescient. Six years on, childhood immunisation rates are falling, preventable diseases are resurfacing, and public confidence not only in vaccinations, but in health authorities in general, is at an all-time low all around the world.
Professor Glenda Gray, then head of the Medical Research Council (MRC) and chair of the Covid-19 research subcommittee of the ministerial medical advisory committee (MAC), was another who refused to be cowed. When she criticised the extended lockdown and warned of child malnutrition in May 2020, the director-general of the Department of Health (DoH) called her a liar and demanded an investigation. The MRC initially capitulated, issuing an abject apology and opening an inquiry, before an enormous local and international academic uproar forced a shamefaced U-turn.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize responded by warning advisers against “potentially destructive behaviour”. A few months later, Gray was dropped from the MAC along with 14 other prominent scientists, including vaccinologist Shabir Madhi, clinician Francois Venter, and Medical Association (SAMA) chair Angelique Coetzee, all of whom had publicly challenged official policy.
The campaign to enforce orthodoxy soon reached ordinary medical practitioners. The DoH warned that doctors who discouraged vaccination or disseminated what it deemed misinformation would face disciplinary action and possible removal from the medical register. SAMA, having read the tea leaves and ditched Coetzee, applauded the move.
The media, too, carries a lot of blame for the febrile climate that prevailed. Journalism largely driven by sensation rather than nuance – amplified by copy-and-paste social media – created a consensus narrative. At that point, science itself came under pressure to conform to what ‘the science’ was already supposed to have decided, and the political establishment dutifully follows suit.
“Follow the science” was a compelling battle cry, but that is not how it panned out. Dissenting voices, including those of reputable scientists, were aggressively silenced. As the evidence accumulated, it became clear that researchers, doctors, politicians, and journalists had repeatedly overstated the strength of the data underpinning life-changing government decisions.
Too often, these distortions were not innocent mistakes made under pressure, but calculated efforts to enforce compliance.
These elisions, exaggerations and downright lies, as well as the suppression of contradictory evidence, were justified as being for our own good. In reality, this manufactured consensus inflicted immense harm on the very people it claimed to protect.
That is why South Africa needs a genuine accounting. Not to embarrass or berate those who made the wrong judgment calls under the pressure of a crisis, but to confront how and why the scientific method surrendered so easily to cant and dogma.
Only such an honest reckoning can rebuild the credibility and trust that the DoH, the government, and the wider medical establishment will need when the next public-health emergency strikes.
Politicsweb article – We too need a Covid accounting (Restricted access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
A bitter dispute over SA’s vaccine secrecy
SA is over the COVID-19 hump; time for a new, provincial strategy — Prof Robin Wood
WHO and national responses to COVID-19 have been ‘fear driven’ — Prof Wood
The real State of Disaster is SA’s new COVID regulations – Scientists’ Collective