A badly written amendment to the notifiable medical condition regulations will normalise a permanent totalitarian healthcare state.
On the eve of South Africa’s first lockdown, just over two years ago, I asked: ‘Given that coronaviruses are not uncommon, and novel variants will continue to appear every few years – to say nothing of other disease epidemics – how can we trust that the totalitarian healthcare state will not become routine and normalised?’
Evidently, we can’t.
The government has finally buckled under the pressure to end the State of Disaster, which allowed a cabal of unaccountable autocrats to establish a command economy that regulates citizens into house arrest and businesses into bankruptcy. (I’ll take the credit; you’re welcome.)
In its place, however, it has written – awfully poorly, I might add – an amendment to the Regulations Relating to the Surveillance and the Control of Notifiable Medical Conditions, first promulgated in 2017.
(To comment on the amendment, please email tsakani.furumele@health.gov.za by Friday, 15 April 2022.)
Poor drafting
As a sample of the poor drafting, consider that the amendment is supposed to cover all of the more than 50 notifiable medical conditions, and not just Covid-19, and then read this: ‘All persons exiting the Republic must have the full vaccination certificate (sic). In the event that such person does not have the full vaccination certificate (sic), a negative PRC (sic) test results (sic) of not more than 72 Hours (sic).’
PRC is not defined. One presumes they mean PCR, which means polymerase chain reaction, a common test for SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19.
The provision on travel is in a section on disease spread by aerosol or droplet transmission, but beyond that, the disease for which a traveller is to be tested isn’t specified.
A literal reading of the amendment would mean travellers now need proof of vaccination or negative tests for all notifiable medical conditions that spread in this manner.
Permanent measures
The new regulations institute permanent measures designed to contain the spread of notifiable medical conditions that spread via droplets or aerosol.
These measures, dreamt up by the despotic commanders during the Covid-19 pandemic, include mandatory mask-wearing indoors and on public transport, employer-provided masks for all employees, enforced social distancing in queues as well as in offices, limiting occupancy of shops and other indoor spaces based on their floor space, making hand sanitisers available to the public, regularly sanitising surfaces in public places, restricting face-to-face meetings and allowing employees to work from home as much as possible.
A new measure is that you may no longer fly, international or domestic, if you have an elevated temperature, even though infrared thermometers in lay hands are useless at determining actual body temperature, and even accurate temperature screening misses Covid-19 in more than half of all cases.
But no, if you’re unlucky enough to present with a fever, maybe because you were running for your plane, you must be denied boarding and must instead be subjected to a medical examination and testing. (Again, the amendment doesn’t specify for which disease(s).)
All of these will be ‘general measures’, not dependent on the declaration of a specific infectious disease epidemic, or on a declaration of a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organisation.
In other words, the ‘totalitarian healthcare state’ will become ‘routine and normalised’, permanently.
After-tears insurrections
During an epidemic or pandemic of a notifiable medical condition, gatherings without proof of vaccination (against what exactly isn’t specified) are limited to 1 000 people indoors and 2 000 people outdoors.
Curiously, funerals are special cases, and are limited to a mere 100 attendees, while night vigils and after-funeral gatherings remain entirely prohibited.
One wonders why funerals are treated so harshly, other than that our cabinet autocrats are heartless bastards who have proven at length that they take a perverse pleasure in making life as unpleasant as possible for their subjects.
Older readers will recall, however, that the apartheid government also placed restrictions on funerals, back in the 1980s. The reason was that with political organisations and meetings being banned, funerals were frequently used as cover for dissidents plotting against the regime.
Perhaps the ANC likewise fears that funerals and after-tears gatherings will become hotbeds for political resistance to its ham-fisted rule.
No right to legal aid
The original regulations set out, in regulation 14, provisions for ‘voluntary medical examination, prophylaxis, treatment, isolation and quarantine’ for people who have a clinically or laboratory-confirmed case of a notifiable medical condition, or are believed to be a carrier, or have been in contact with such a person.
Like any good Orwellian state, however, the very next section, 15, provides for ‘mandatory medical examination, prophylaxis, treatment, isolation and quarantine,’ for people who do pose a public health risk but refused to comply with the ‘voluntary (haha)’ measures.
The mandatory measures require a High Court order, however. A further provision in section 17 guarantees the right to legal representation, or in the case of indigent persons, state-sponsored legal aid, if such an order is sought.
The amendment, however, adds a clause to regulation 17 that says ‘notwithstanding’ these rights, a person ‘may be compelled’ to subject themselves to medical examination, prophylaxis, treatment, isolation and quarantine.
This seems to subvert the right to legal representation and is, at best, ambiguous in its meaning.
Another new clause in the amendment, 15A.(1) also says that a person who has contracted, is suspected of having contracted, or has been in contact with someone who has contracted a notifiable medical condition, may not refuse an array of things being done to them, including being examined, having bodily samples taken, being admitted to a healthcare facility or an isolation or quarantine site, and submitting to mandatory prophylaxis and treatment.
There is no mention of a High Court order at all in this new clause.
Some political observers have interpreted this to leave the door open for mandatory vaccinations against notifiable medical conditions in future.
Pointless bureaucracy
The isolation and quarantine rules under the recent National State of Disaster have long been done away with. The original regulations make provision for isolation and quarantine according to Health Department guidelines, however.
Despite these facts, the new amendment spends many pages detailing elaborate provisions for isolation and quarantine of persons who are diagnosed with, are suspected of having contracted, or have been in contact with someone who contracted a notifiable medical condition.
The upshot is that if the government wishes you to quarantine or isolate, and you’re not a one percenter who has access to a room with an en-suite bathroom that isn’t shared with others, as well as access to the internet, a telephone and a private physician, you can be forcibly locked up in a government facility.
Even though contact tracing for Covid-19 was also abandoned recently (and only really makes sense in the very early stages of an outbreak, anyway), the amendment also includes an elaborate set of rules for a national contact tracing database.
The wording covers all notifiable medical conditions, and will hoover up personal details and contact information for people who tested positively as well as anyone they volunteer as recent contacts.
It says that the information is confidential and must remain confidential, but we all know what happens to confidential information.
Confusingly, it also makes provision for de-identifying or destroying the data in this database ‘six weeks after the national state of disaster has lapsed or has been terminated’.
In another example of sloppy drafting, it does not specify which national disaster, nor that the national disaster one is forced to infer from context has in fact already been terminated.
Assuming they’re not planning to restart contact tracing in the next five weeks, the entire contact tracing section seems to be made pointless by that provision.
Not much new
Surprisingly, many of the provisions in the amendment that have political opponents of the government up in arms are already established in the 2017 regulations.
The right of government to force people to undergo examinations, prophylaxis (such as vaccinations), treatment, isolation and quarantine already existed. It is nothing new.
Not even the list of notifiable medical conditions has changed, and it already includes in the most serious category respiratory disease caused by a novel respiratory pathogen, such as novel influenza A virus, or MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus, which would cover SARS-CoV-2.
What is new is the formalisation of isolation and quarantine procedures, and the continuation of a motley selection of lockdown rules dreamed up by command-council despots during the Covid-19 lockdowns that will now become a permanent fixture, to combat the spread not only of SARS-CoV-2, but also any of over 50 other notifiable medical conditions.
A group of infectious disease specialists, Marc Mendelson, Shabir Madhi, Jeremy Nel, Glenda Gray, Regina Osih and Francois Venter, comprehensively denounced the regulations as ‘incoherent and illogical’, and called them ‘the real state of disaster’.
Welcome to the totalitarian healthcare state.
The views of the writer are not necessarily those of the Daily Friend or the IRR.