The government is in advanced talks with US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) to secure an additional 20-million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, after plans to start inoculating health-care workers with AstraZeneca’s shot hit a major stumbling block at the weekend.
The Anglo-Swedish company’s offering was intended to be the cornerstone of the first phase of SA’s coronavirus vaccination drive, as it is relatively cheap and easy to store.
But evidence emerged at the weekend indicating it fails to protect people from mild to moderate Covid-19 illness caused by 501Y.V2, the variant that emerged in SA late in 2020, forcing the government to reconsider its strategy.
On Monday, health minister Zweli Mkhize said the government would press ahead with its plans to start vaccinating health-care workers in mid-February but would instead provide them with J&J’s shot, which has been shown to offer protection against the new variant and to prevent severe illness and death from Covid-19.
The government will wait for guidance from scientists before deciding whether to provide health-care workers with the AstraZeneca shot. Some scientists hope that the vaccine will at least provide protection against severe Covid-19 and death, but there is no evidence to support this view and further research is needed.
The government is now trying to expedite supplies of J&J’s shot, as well as the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech. It has already secured 9-million doses of J&J’s coronavirus vaccine at $10 (R149) a dose, and J&J confirmed on Monday that talks are under way to secure more.
A presentation made by the health department to a cabinet lekgotla on January 28 says there was an opportunity to obtain an extra 20-million doses from J&J.
The company declined to answer Business Day’s questions, but a source confirmed this was the figure on the table.
“J&J is in advanced discussions with the SA government about potential additional collaborations to combat Covid-19 in the country, and we hope to be able to share more details in the coming days,” J&J said. “We are committed to addressing the needs of the most vulnerable and at-risk populations worldwide and to supporting further clinical understanding of the variants to help stop their spread.”
J&J’s coronavirus vaccine has not yet been approved by the SA Health Products Regulatory Authority for general use, but the medicines regulator has previously given it the green light for research purposes as it was tested in SA as part of an international phase 3 trial called Ensemble. This means it can immediately be rolled out to health-care workers within a research setting, the minister said in a statement on Monday.
Medical Research Council president Glenda Gray, the local principal investigator on the Ensemble trial, said on Sunday the J&J vaccine had been proved safe and effective, and she assured health-care workers that they were not being used as guinea pigs.
“This is not an experiment. We want to protect our health-care workers. The quickest way we can bring this [vaccine] to health-care workers is in this programme,” she said.
All health-care workers would be offered the vaccine and there would be no placebo shots, she said. “We want to understand better any breakthrough infections, and what impact the vaccine is having on viral escape. It is very important for us to do this and to make sure our health-care workers are protected before the third wave,” she said.
The phase 3 Ensemble trial included 15,000 volunteers in the UK and another 4,400 in SA. The trial showed the vaccine was safe and offered 57% protection against Covid-19 in SA, where the new variant was already dominant by the time volunteers were vaccinated.
No-one who received the vaccine was admitted to hospital or died from Covid-19.
Correction: February 9 2021
This article has been updated to correctly reflect that the J&J vaccine has been shown to offer 57% protection in trials, not 49.9%.
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