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While it is early days yet in the national vaccination programme against Covid-19 with only 756 291 people having had their first vaccination and of those 518 968 having had their second, Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care Dr John Mangwiro was right to start thinking aloud about what sort of people in what sort of places really needed to be vaccinated.

While any Government policy is still to be formulated, Dr Mangwiro has started asking the questions, the right questions.

Should people running stalls at the major markets be vaccinated before they are allowed to work there? Should all prisoners be routinely vaccinated?

Should people entering other places where large crowds gather be vaccinated? Just where would we need to produce our vaccination certificates?

These are important questions and Dr Mangwiro gave the reasons why he is now thinking aloud. He thinks it is quite wrong that a Zimbabwean should be at risk from another Zimbabwean and we all need to start thinking about protecting each other.

When we look at Mbare Musika or Sakubva Musika we see large crowds and many stalls. There is a degree of control, such as sanitising at gates and masking, but the huge crowds are a risk and unfortunately as they are selling food there is not much we can do to eliminated those crowds, So vaccination of at least those who work in these markets could do a lot to protect everyone.

It is the same at the smaller informal markets. We all understand that people need to earn a living and often this is the best way they can do this.

But outside the formal public and private markets no one is really checking on vendors. But if they were at least vaccinated then the risks would be sharply reduced.

In some countries, where some spectators are now allowed to watch sport, the experiment is being tried of demanding those vaccination certificates at the entrance to the sports ground, along with the masks and other precautions, to bring the risk of a crowd down to the absolute minimum.

These are all practical measures to enhance safety and public health.

The Deputy Minister was not suggesting that vaccination should be made compulsory, but what he was suggesting was that access to some places would be limited to those who were vaccinated, on the grounds of public safety.

There are many other areas where in time vaccination needs to be the norm. In business premises you can get large numbers of staff, and while the Government has asked all organisations to have half of non-essential staff working from home, it would be easy as the vaccination programme rolls out to instead make it compulsory that those on the premises are vaccinated, and the unvaccinated can be asked to work from home.

People who have to work in premises with lots of other people are probably, on the whole, keen on being vaccinated and would almost certainly raise few complaints if the rest of the people they worked with were also vaccinated.

This is why Victoria Falls became the first city with herd immunity once the decision was taken to give it a high priority.

Generally speaking everyone working in the local tourism industry, and the city is built on that industry, was keen to not only be protected, but also to ensure the whole city was protected so that as visitors were allowed in they would know they were safe.

One problem with compulsory vaccination is the small minority who are reluctant to get their jabs.

This is one reason why the Government has been very careful to stress the voluntary nature of the vaccinations, although many in leadership positions in both public, religious and private sectors, from President Mnangagwa down, has raced in for their vaccinations as soon as their group was called.

The Public Health Act does allow compulsory vaccination. This is one way smallpox was totally defeated around the world. But in the case of Covid-19 as we get a lot closer to full coverage there are other options, simply because Covid-19 has effective tests.

Those who need to be protected, or need to vaccinated to protect others because of where they work, could easily be given the option of a weekly PCR test at their own expense so that those they associate with know they are not infected.

The fact that the large majority get two free jabs while the anti-vaxxer would need to buy an expensive weekly test would provide an economic incentive for vaccination, but produce the same level of safety for others.

In any case, the thinking aloud by Dr Mangwiro was not to make vaccination compulsory for everyone, but only a requirement for those working in difficult and crowded conditions so that others were protected.

We obviously need to vaccinate a lot more people before we can implement any sort of policy asking people in certain places to present certificates, and even then there would have to be notice given so they could be vaccinated by any deadline, but it is right that we start thinking how to eliminate potential hotspots by making sure it is far harder for them to become hot.

It might not be necessary to formalise vaccination as a condition of working in dangerous places. So far the response to vaccination has been a lot higher than the ability of the medical teams to cope.

Now that the supply lines have been opened up wider, and the national programme is being accelerated, a lot more people will be coming forward.

Anti-vaxxers make a lot of noise, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty almost everyone wants to maximise their chances of staying well while they earn their living and they are more than happy to respond quickly when their group is called in for their jabs.