AN application for an order compelling various organs of state to cease making vaccinations against Covid-19 available was rejected by the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria recently.
The application failed on various grounds, including a lack of sufficient evidence that the vaccines caused “strange” medical conditions.
The three non-profit organisations – Covid Care Alliance, Transformative Health Justice and Free the Children – Save the Nation – asked, among other things, for an order interdicting the government from urging South Africans to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and from distributing vaccines to vaccination centres.
The grounds for the application were that they, together with some doctors in South Africa, had tried to draw the attention of the government and health authorities to what they have labelled “strange and unusual medical conditions” which they had witnessed in patients who had been administered Covid-19 vaccines.
They argued that in general, there were otherwise healthy people who, after receiving the Covid-19 vaccines, experienced “unexplainable changes” to their blood cell structure or who had “unexplainable foreign substances” in their blood.
They said the health of some children who had been vaccinated had been affected and some of them had even died as a result of the vaccination.
The applicants said there was no “logic” in administering vaccines to children with or without pre-existing medical conditions where “damage to health is being witnessed in healthy people, young and old”.
The applicants argued that to safeguard the nation, it was imperative to apply a precautionary rule and stop the vaccine.
The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Saphra), one of the respondents, conceded that in general, evaluation of medicines for registration
or approval took up to 20 months.
It said, however, in response to the pandemic and in order to ensure South Africa had all “weapons” available to fight the Covid19 pandemic, it had introduced a “rolling review process”.
That created a mechanism that facilitated the submission of data as it became available but it did not detract from the evaluation of the vaccines against the applicable standards of safety, quality and efficacy.
Saphra argued that its approach was supported by evidence from other regulatory authorities such as the World Health Organisation, the European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration.
Judge Norman Davis said it was accepted that there were people who had received vaccinations and experienced adverse health symptoms which they perceived were related to the vaccines but which had not been scientifically proved.
“Insofar as there had been ‘vaccine related’ deaths, these were in such a minuscule percentage of a total administered vaccine, that they can rightly be labelled ‘extremely rare’. It is clear from the bulk of evidence that the benefits of administering vaccines and obtaining community immunity by far outweigh those instances of adverse events,” the judge said.
He said the applicants did not have the right to prevent others who did not share their beliefs or opinions from being vaccinated.
In turning down the application, he said the usurping of the role of Saphra and the National Immunisation Safety Expert Committee would undermine their statutory obligations and cause the court to cross the line delineating the separation of powers.