It is dour news in South Africa today as the country’s vaccine strategy needed to be overhauled to better fight the mutation of the coronavirus inside our borders. As this changes happens there’s once again an influx of fake news and fearmongering around topics such as 5G, microchips, the dangers of the vaccine and more.
The Department of Higher Education, with the Department of Health, have put out various tweets under the hashtags #COVID19Vaccination, #VaccineRolloutSA and #VaccineRolloutStategySA. These tweets contain various pieces of information from the government about the state of the vaccine in South Africa with some of the most interesting being the various infographic-type images which try to dispel fake news – or “myths” – about the vaccine.
You may have seen versions of these floating around on the internet in the past but these latest ones are worth heading now. Just because the way the vaccine will be handled in South Africa has changed does not mean we can rest easy and let false information spread freely.
The five pieces of fake news that the government tackles here deal with: what’s in the vaccines, mRNA, microchips, COVID-19 testing and 5G networks. They can all be viewed below.
Mention is made below of SAHPRA when discussing what is in the vaccines. SAHPRA is the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority and is an entity that has oversight on medication in the country to ensure that what we take is safe. The misinformation stating that the government has no idea about what is inside of the vaccines is false.
“SAHPRA assumed the roles of both the Medicines Control Council (MCC) as well as the Directorate of Radiation Control (DRC) which were housed at the National Department of Health (NDoH). Subsequently, SAHPRA was constituted as an independent entity that reports to the National Minister of Health through its Board,” reads the outline of the entity.
It’s a sad state of affairs that information like this has to be repeated so many times to try and quell the fake news spread around locally.
[Image – MasterTux on Pixabay]
