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#OrchidsandOnions Special Section

#OrchidsandOnions: Vaxx on, wax off

King Price: insurer takes on anti-vaxxers and promotes the jab; Kudos for the City of Cape Town for shooting a 'virus expert' down.
#OrchidsandOnions: Vaxx on, wax off

This message today comes directly to you from the Sheep Pen where I, and the rest of the meek and compliant, do whatever we are told by those who want to change and depopulate the world.

So...

One of the saddest phenomena of present-day South Africa is how so many apparently intelligent people are turning their backs on the work of multitudes of global scientists and refusing to get vaccinated.

They seem to see themselves as some kind of anointed survivors of the Apocalypse, the people who can see Doomsday coming and are prepared for it.

These freedom fighters can see that this struggle is not about health, it is about control and freedom and that, soon enough, if you are forced to have a vaccination, you will be herded into train cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz to be gassed.

Many and varied are their reasons – from the loony fringe who believe this is an Illuminati plot to control the world, to those who believe that the vaccines are “experimental” and that they kill people. And they have developed a peculiar herd immunity – to reason and rational argument.

The results of this liberation struggle are plain to see: our vaccination rates are dropping – and, whether the nonbelievers like it or not, the unvaxxed are more likely to get infected with Covid, to get hospitalised and to die.

That is dreadful news for us as a country because, as the fourth wave starts building momentum, we are soon going to see ICUs and wards filled with Covid patients.

Before that, though, we are going to see the authorities taking us back to higher lockdown levels – with the economic destruction and societal suffering that entails.

There are many organisations, both government and private, doing their best to put out correct information and to encourage people to get vaccinated often in the case of threatened boycotts by the freedom fighters.

I salute those who decide to put their brand on the line and do the right thing – and the right thing is to encourage people to get jabbed.

King Price insurance has decided to do just that in a video that is going viral at the moment.

Continuing in the vein of its other humorous, locally relevant ads, this one again features Kallie, the farmer who once thought that the way to sort out his sex life was to ‘act sexy to a tractor’ (act sexy to attract her...)

This time he is painfully ripping out his chest hair as he ‘waxes’ because he thought the doctor told him that if he wanted to have a long and happy life with his wife, he would have to ‘wax’ and then do it again six weeks later.

‘Wax?’ No Kallie, it’s ‘vaxxed’ – get vaccinated, he gets told.

The punchline is that in these “strange times”, there is a call for “strangely simple insurance”. The humour is spot-on, the get vaccinated message is to and so is the commercial punt for the brand. The anti-vaxxers probably won’t like it – so King Price might find themselves boycotted by some.

Mind you, if you’re in insurance, you don’t like high-risk clients who deliberately put their lives at risk.

Orchids for King Price.

Another one for Cape Town

And another one goes to the City of Cape Town, which is the municipal leader in this country in producing really good public service announcements.

This one features “Jan Keerom” who is an “electrical expert”.

He explains wires and rewiring – but then goes on to say that the vaccines do that, too: they rewire your body.

Then comes the placard that Jan is “Not a virus expert”. The ad continues: “Just because they say it doesn’t make it true. Fake news causes real harm. Check the source. Check for mistakes. Check if is it’s anywhere else.”

Then comes the city’s vaccination campaign slogan: “Vaccinate. Save lives.”

Not quite as funny as King Price, but it gets the message across clearly. If only more municipalities did this sort of marketing as opposed to taking out ads with the picture of their mayors emblazoned all over them...

About Brendan Seery

Brendan Seery has been in the news business for most of his life, covering coups, wars, famines - and some funny stories - across Africa. Brendan Seery's Orchids and Onions column ran each week in the Saturday Star in Johannesburg and the Weekend Argus in Cape Town.
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