lines are forming. you know, and he s not necessarily con convincing people take the vaccine and i ve written about this in wall street journallening that boosters make sense and vaccines make sense but you know there s not emphasis on fact either that the omicron variant gives yo an 80% less likely chance of ending up in the hospital that s reassuring to people but that message isn t out there either nor is the mmgdz if you got cover covid that you re less leakily to get a severe strain severe illness here either. if you got over the delta variant even if you got omicron it is likely to be very mild. paul: so you re buying studies that coming out of the south africa that this is likely to be not as lethal or dangerous? you know, i spoke to doctor from south africa other day who is big public health official in the national institute of
parts of the world, in the u.s., in the eu, in other parts of the world are speaking to scientists here from the health minister from the national institute of communicable diseases to help them make their own guidelines in their own countries. larry, to fight this, obviously, you need more people getting vaccinated. there seems to be plenty of supply in south african. vaccine hesitancy is a big issue. i heard you on an earlier hour, saying something that i hadn t heard before. which was, in fact, some people in the u.s. who were vaccine skeptics are actually having an influence there many south africa. take us through that? that is right. there is a significant amount, i should say, of people who are anti-vaxers or hesitant to get vaccinated, partly because they ve been long to right-wing commentators, conservative viewpoints from the u.s. joe rogen, for instance, has a following here in south africa and they listen to that and
and the positivity rate of 24.3% in south africa is also out of the ordinary. the health ministry here saying just two months ago the positivity rate was under 5%. so you can see how quickly that has jumped. the other two tidbits to take out of of this is that they re seeing some reinfections from people who were already vaccinated who are getting covid again but they don t know if this will be more serious than delta, for instance. another tidbit also to take out from the data that we ve seen from south africa, the national institute of communicable diseases and one of the things was that some children as young as 2 years old in one small region are making up some of those who are getting hospitalized. so there s still a whole lot we don t know. but what we do know here in the south african case, at least 98% of those who are getting covid right now are those who are unvaccinated. that s why this country is encouraging as many people as possible to get vaccinated. as they learn more a
National Institute of Communicable Diseases warns of potential rabies outbreak iol.co.za - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from iol.co.za Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Drop in child vaccinations a danger
South Africa needs to drastically improve its data capturing, surveillance and monitoring of immunisation for children under the age of five to prevent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough against which they are underprotected.
This emerged last week from interviews with some of the country’s top paediatricians, virologists and public health specialists.
They were speaking after the health department said during Global Immunisation Week that its child hexavalent and measles inoculation doses fall below acceptable targets for maximum effect. The hexavalent vaccine protects children against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), poliomyelitis, Haemophilus influenza type B and hepatitis B.