Minister Joe Phaahla: Health Dept Budget Vote 2022/23

• Published date: 10 May 2022
• Publication title: South African Official News

We thank the speaker for this opportunity to present the Budget vote of the Department of Health for the 2022/23 financial year.

Hon chair we present this budget vote at a time of lots of hope and optimism after a devastating two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a country we have witnessed four waves of COVID-19 and we are now in a speculation as to whether we are already in the 5th wave, or it is still coming. Indications at this are that we are not yet in the 5th wave but as the cold weather takes hold and we spend more times indoors the risk of the 5th wave continues to loom large.

Over the four waves we have lost loved ones, family and friends, work colleagues, national leaders and icons from various aspect of life including National, Religions, Traditional and Business leaders. Even to the houses of parliament have not been spared.

We thank the leadership provided by the government of South Africa under President Ramaphosa for not only guiding the nation throughout these turbulent times but for mobilizing all of society behind the mitigation interventions. I wish to restate again the measures that government took utilizing the Disaster Management Act were meant to protect the people of South Africa against the harshest impact of COVID-19.

All of us will remember the images we saw of the devastation the various parts of the world in various continents such as Europe; US and Brazil etc. We are grateful that while our country has also suffered a lot including the loss of more than hundred thousand lives, devastation to the economy with massive job losses, our health services while it struggled especially under first three waves, never collapsed under the pressure.

We thank leaders of all sectors of society for working together with government. We wish to assure all South Africans, that as government we get no joy in inconveniencing you from time to time with restrictions. We say sorry where we have wronged you but please be assured that all interventions were meant and are still meant for all of us to avoid severe impact of COVID-19.

We completely disagree with armchair critics who argue that we should drop all public health measures and just let the virus spread at will and only worry about whether hospitals are full or not.

While the pandemic has derailed some of our programmes as we had to redirect all resources, we have also had positive experiences and lessons during this period. We have learned to work as government from local to national, and bring in skills and expertise from our entities.

We have learnt on how to work together with private sector, from securing of commodities such as PPEs, diagnostics, therapeutics and even more securing and administering vaccines. We have learned how to work with our scientists to guide our intervention, not always easy because scientists themselves do not always agree as is the case in other aspects of life.

From where we were last year this time, we have made lots of progress with our vaccination programme. As of yesterday, we have administered 35, 182 million vaccine doses to just over 19,717 million adult individuals which is 49, 5% of all adults. Whilst it is the time that over 70% of the population have had contact with the viruses...