Tutu calls for mass vaccination as soon as possible

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pledged to have the Covid-19 vaccine as soon as it is available to him and has urged others to do the same. In a message on the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation website, the 89-year-old said that it would take mass vaccination to break the chain transmission of the disease.
He pointed out that  “… to do that properly, the majority of people in a community need to be vaccinated. This is what is known as “herd immunity. The percentage of a population that needs to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity differs from disease to disease. For measles it is 95%, for polio 80%. We do not yet know what the percentage for Covid-19 is, but we do know this: the more of us who have the vaccine, the better for all of us.”
Tutu recalled how vaccination had saved him once before, saying: “When I was a teenager, in 1945, I contracted tuberculosis. It robbed me of two years of my life as I underwent treatment in a TB hospital. I was lucky. I recovered.”
He was pledging to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, he said, because he already knew what it was like to lose years of your life to a disease.
“I also know what it is to worry that I have passed a preventable disease on to people I love. I ask you to do the same. Don’t let Covid-19 continue to ravage our country, or our world.  Vaccinate.”