Professor Linda-Gail Bekker cautions that some might say, “‘I’m going to rely on my neighbour,’ but if everyone says that then we’re going to end up with not enough people getting vaccinated. So, we need enough people in the collective to say, ‘Okay, I will be the person to step forward and do this. The number we’ve heard is two-thirds, and we’ve heard this from the vaccine committee, who are experts, that 67% of the population need to have received the vaccine in order for us to receive this secondary benefit.”
Vaccine scientist and President of the Medical Research Council Professor Glenda Gray said there is a great deal of evidence that these vaccines “work quite spectacularly” and will save people’s lives. A vaccine will help the economy, the individual and the health system.
Gray said there is early evidence that the vaccine will reduce the chance of infection of one person by another, so community transmission will be dramatically reduced.
Professor Valerie Mizrahi, Director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town, confirms that if we fail to reach at least two-thirds of the people (67%), “it will just take us that much longer to reach herd immunity”.
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