SA’s vaccination programme took a leap forward this week with 117,000 people vaccinated in the past four days, as the public sector ramped up and the private sector joined the drive.
Business for SA, an umbrella structure of business organisations, said on Friday that both sectors intended to ramp up “aggressively” over the next month and were aiming to reach 192,500 vaccinations a day by the end of May.
Martin Kingston, who heads the B4SA steering committee, said that sufficient supplies of vaccine have been secured to vaccinate the entire adult population. In the case of Pfizer, these were coming into the country at a rate of 325,000 a week, soon to be increased to 640,000. In the case of J&J, 1.1-million jabs had already been produced and were waiting at the Aspen manufacturing facility. Another one-million was scheduled for the end of the month, with one-million a month arriving thereafter.
The hold on the J&J vaccine by the US’s FDA had temporarily paused this supply, but Kingston said their communication with US government officials implied that this would be resolved imminently.
Over the past week there were 155 public vaccination sites and 22 private sector sites in operation.
Kingston said that by Thursday this week, a total number of jabs of 34,000 a day had been achieved and it was hoped that on Friday, vaccinators would hit the mark of 54,000. By June, it was hoped that a steady stream of 192,000 a day could be achieved.
However, this is still short of the 200,000 to 300,000 target a day needed if all SA adults are to vaccinated by the end of 2021.
The biggest hurdle to the vaccine programme at the moment was the low number of registrations of people over the age of 60 on the electronic database. Of a population of 5.4-million, only 1.6-million have registered, which Kingston said was “disappointingly low”.
Both government and business were reaching out to faith-based organisations and other community organisations to assist in the registration drive.
The biggest controllable risks to the rollout were failure of the logistics plan, vaccine hesitancy and the security of the vaccine supply. Uncontrollable risks were that vaccines were of low efficacy from the virus, supply commitments by manufacturers were not met and that there might be a notable effect on the programme by a third wave of infection.
Discovery Health’s Ron Whelan, who is involved in the B4SA initiative said: “The first week has gone pretty well. There have been some challenges, which was expected. The big point now is to ramp up the vaccine capacity quickly.”
In response to questions on whether the prioritising of vaccines for over-60s was the most appropriate and targeted the most vulnerable, Kingston said that age and comorbidities were highly correlated. People over 60 were 6.6 times more likely to die of Covid-19 and four times more likely to be hospitalised.
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