Police members ordered to vaccinate against Covid-19

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Police members ordered to vaccinate against Covid-19

10:29 CAT | 04 Jan 2022

Photo: in file CoM

The General Commander of the Mozambican police, Bernadino Rafael, has ordered all members of the police force to ensure that they are vaccinated against the Covid-19 respiratory disease – but this rational public health measure has led to howls in some quarters that Rafael is violating the human rights of policemen.

“At the first graduation parade of 2022, each member of the Mozambican police must bring his or her vaccination card”, said Rafael. “Anyone entering the parade ground must show a vaccination card”.

“This is not a request – it’s an order that the General Commander is giving”, declared Rafael. He warned that anyone who did not bring a vaccination card would be marked as absent.

Tuesday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Carta de Mocambique”, gave space to a human rights lawyer, Joao Nhampossa, to denounce Rafael in an article which talks, absurdly, of a “vaccine dictatorship”.

Up until now, Mozambique has been refreshingly free of “vaccine denialism” or “vaccine hesitancy” – but here was a lawyer claiming that a basic public health measure is a violation of human rights.

Nhampossa claimed that there is nothing in the Mozambican Constitution about compulsory vaccination. This is true. But there is also nothing in the Constitution that obliges motorists and their passengers to wear seat belts, and nothing that bans smoking in public places.

Nhampossa accused Rafael of limiting “the right to work and the right to choose” of members of the police force. He claimed that Rafael is abusing his power. “If the orders issued by the General Commander have no legal basis, this means that they are arbitrary, and contradict the operational rules of the public administration”. That in turn meant that they contradicted human rights, and the right to justice of police members.

Nhampossa seems entirely unaware that Mozambique is in the grip of the fourth wave of a potentially lethal pandemic, against which vaccination is the most powerful weapon available.

Members of the police come into contact, every day, with the public. An unvaccinated policeman is likely to spread the disease, and so Rafael’s order makes perfectly good sense, even if there is no specific clause in the Constitution which says “public servants must be vaccinated”.

Nhampossa thought it urgent that the Public Prosecutor’s Office, as the guarantor of legality, step in to overturn Rafael’s order – otherwise it could have a multiplier effect on other sectors.

Indeed, it should have a multiplier effect! That would be entirely salutary. The only way we know to defeat the pandemic is through mass vaccination.

It is strange to find a prominent Mozambican lawyer taking the same side as the vaccine denialists on the right wing of the American Republican Party or of the British Conservative Party, who are already complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Source: AIM