Department of Educational Psychology

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    COVID-19 revealed South Africa's need to circularise its economy
    (AOSIS Publishing, 2025) Babane Vusiwana C
    When the first coronavirus disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) case was diagnosed in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, no one would have predicted its rapid global transmission pace. As physicians, epidemiologists and policy makers were frantically investigating the pathogen’s natural reservoir, it rampantly spread to all continents. Beginning with a few cases identified in Wuhan (Li, Liu & Ge 2020), by mid-June 2023, ‘there were 767,984,989 confirmed cases of COVID-19’ globally (World Health Organization [WHO] 2023, p. 1). This exponential increase in global infections from 2019 to 2020 as well as morbidity and mortality rates impelled the WHO to declare COVID-19 a global health emergency of international concern in early 2020 (Sohrabi et al. 2020). By the time, this WHO declaration was lifted in May 2023, COVID-19 had claimed the lives of 6,943,390 people worldwide (WHO 2023) of which 256,542 were Africans (Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention 2023). These high mortality statistics at a global level were because of the initial lack of safe, effective vaccines and later, their delayed roll out post-development because of regulatory and policy approval bottlenecks. There are, however, continental and country-level variations that explain delayed vaccine roll out and, in some cases, outright limited access. A case in point is South Africa, which I use as a reference point in this chapter to argue that thousands of lives and livelihoods were lost because of a complex combination of factors that include profiteering by big pharmaceutical