Civil rights organization to oppose vaccine mandate

Civil rights organisation AfriForum said it will oppose vaccine mandates if they were implemented by the government.

“In a letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa, the civil rights organisation AfriForum stated that vaccine mandates are an unjustifiable violation of personal freedoms and that it will oppose vaccine mandates if implemented by the government,” AfriForum’s head of policy and action Ernst Roets said.

This was after Ramaphosa, at the weekend, announced that the government had set up a task team that would undertake broad consultations on making a vaccination a mandatory condition for access to specific activities and locations.

This would, he said, include access to workplaces, public events, public transport and public establishments.

After concluding its work, the task would report to the inter-ministerial committee on vaccination chaired by the deputy president of the country and would make recommendations to the cabinet on a “fair and sustainable” approach to vaccine mandates.

“Based on the principle of freedom of choice and constitutional right to bodily autonomy, if the government implements vaccine mandates, AfriForum will take the necessary steps to oppose them,” Roets said.

“If we support state coercion with matters we personally agree on at the moment, we open the door for the state to be able to impose something on us in the future with which we ourselves may have a problem with in principle.”

Roets added that state coercion was dangerous, regardless of the matter and that people should not give government consent to use it in an increasingly expanded array of situations.

“Vaccine mandates are unjustifiable in a free society,” he said.

He also highlighted that they were only opposed to forced vaccinations, but were fully in favour of voluntary vaccinations in the letter they sent to Ramaphosa.

He further said that international examples had shown that vaccinations not only failed when they were mandatory, but also achieved the opposite effect due to people’s hardened attitudes and the backlash it created.

In the letter, AfriForum highlights how in an address to the nation in February 2021, the president promised that: “I want to be clear, nobody will be forced to take this vaccine, I want to repeat, nobody will be forced to take this vaccine. Nobody will be forbidden from travelling to wherever they want to travel to, including from enrolling at school or from taking part in any public activity if they have not been vaccinated.”

“Now his administration is considering doing exactly that. Seeing the president go back on his promise is very concerning,” Roets said.

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During his address at the weekend, Ramaphosa said that while the introduction of a vaccine mandate was “a difficult and complex issue”, it needed to be addressed both seriously and as a matter of urgency.

“We realise that the introduction of such measures is a difficult and complex issue, but if we do not address this seriously and as a matter of urgency, we will continue to be vulnerable to new variants and will continue to suffer new waves of infection,” he said.

Ramaphosa added that vaccines were the first tool citizens had to fight the deadly virus, face masks, fresh air and avoiding gatherings were the other tools that could be used to tackle the spread of Covid-19.

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