Discovery building
Financial services group Discovery has confirmed that its mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policy will remain in place despite the government scrapping regulations relating to the pandemic.
Last month health minister Joe Phaahla repealed the Covid-19 regulations on the wearing of face masks indoors, on public gatherings and the requirement for Covid-19 tests for incoming overseas travellers. Phaahla said South Africa had exited its fifth wave of the pandemic and all regulations “no longer need to be in place at the present moment”.
Responding to questions from the Mail & Guardian, Ronald Whelan, Discovery’s Covid-19 task team leader and chief commercial officer, said the policy was being continued to provide the safest possible working environment for all employees.
The health and financial services provider was one of the first corporations to advocate for and implement a mandatory Covid-19 vaccine policy, saying this provided an “additive protective benefit for workers”. It announced the advent of the mandate last September, as the third wave was at its peak in South Africa, and implemented it from 1 January 2022 for locally-based employees.
Whelan said 98% of all Discovery South Africa’s staff have been vaccinated.
“Through a carefully considered process, employees have had multiple opportunities for engagement and objection to vaccination. For the small number of employees who remain unvaccinated, reasonable accommodation has been agreed in the vast majority of cases, to best protect these employees and their colleagues,” he said.
Standard Bank has done away with its own mandatory vaccination policy, the bank said earlier this week. This came after finance union the South African Society of Bank Officials (Sasbo) said it would challenge the bank’s dismissal of at least 40 of its members for not complying with the policy.
The bank required all staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by 4 April 2022 or be dismissed.
Sasbo told the Mail & Guardian that it is giving Standard Bank until Friday to tell the union its plans to reinstate the 40 dismissed employees.
Asked whether Discovery would follow Standard Bank’s decision to suspend its mandatory vaccination policy, Whelan reiterated: “Discovery has no intention to change its Covid-19 vaccination policy at this stage.”
He said there were five main scientific reasons for the mandatory policy to remain in place for Discovery, the first being that the virus that causes Covid-19 continues to be endemic in South Africa, with an ongoing spread of infection, albeit at much lower rates of infection than in prior waves.
Secondly, Covid-19 vaccines remain effective in protecting against severe disease and death even in the face of the BA.4 and BA.5 variants currently dominant in South Africa.
BA.4 and BA.5 are strains of the Omicron variant.
Whelan also noted that the risk of onward secondary transmission of Covid-19 is approximately 68% to 72% lower from vaccinated people. That means that if vaccinated people do become infected, they have a substantially lower chance of spreading the virus to others, especially in poorly ventilated high-risk settings.
The fourth reason for keeping the policy in place is that vaccination provides significant additive protection in people previously infected with Covid-19. “People with prior infection who have been vaccinated are four times less likely to be reinfected than people who haven’t been vaccinated,” he said.
The final reason, Whelan said, is that significant uncertainty remains in relation to future variants and waves of infection.
“Although there have been no further variants of concern identified in the past few months, the risk of a new variant emerging remains. The best way of mitigating this risk and uncertainty is to ensure that everyone has the strongest possible wall of immunity to protect against potential future infection,” he said.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.
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