The government expects to take delivery of its first one-million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s commercially produced Covid-19 vaccine in two weeks time, health minister Zweli Mkhize announced on Thursday.
Combined with supplies expected from Pfizer before the end of April, this will enable the government to finish vaccinating healthcare workers and move into the next stage of inoculating the over 60s, he said.
The government’s vaccination programme is slowly gathering momentum, after it was dealt a major blow in February with the discovery that its initial vaccine of choice — AstraZeneca’s shot — offered only minimal protection against mild and moderate cases of Covid-19 caused by a new coronavirus variant that now dominates transmission in SA.
It halted plans to administer AstraZeneca’s vaccine, and switched to J&J’s shot in an implementation study designed as a bridging strategy until the vaccine had been registered for commercial use in SA.
The government has so far vaccinated 278,900 of the 500,000 healthcare workers targeted in the study, barely 0.7% of the 40-million people it aims to reach in its national inoculation drive.
The government has signed procurement agreements for 31-million doses of J&J’s single shot jab, and 20-million doses of Pfizer’s double-shot vaccine.
Mkhize said the first one-million J&J shots would come from local pharmaceutical manufacturer Aspen Pharmacare, which is one of several companies contracted by J&J to help produce its jab. But the next tranche, comprising 900,000 dose batches in May and June, might come from its facility in Belgium.
He said the exact delivery date for the first J&J shots would depend on the timing of quality assurance tests, but the government expected to receive the shots between April 22 and 24.
The health department expected to receive a supply schedule from Pfizer early next week and anticipated the first batch would arrive before the end of April, he said.
The Serum Institute of India had fully refunded SA for the 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s shot that it had not delivered, and the one-million doses that had been supplied to SA had been sold to other African countries, he said.
In a separate development, Western Cape Premier Alan Winde said the province was still intent on securing its own Covid-19 vaccine supplies.
Western Cape head of health Keith Cloete said officials would provide Winde with a report on Friday, evaluating the unsolicited proposals it had received from 26 vaccine manufacturers and suppliers. It had also engaged directly with J&J and Pfizer.
Western Cape health department spokesperson Mark van den Heever said it was important for the provincial government to have a contingency plan in place, as it did not yet have any certainty about the number of vaccine doses it could expect from the national government.
Health Justice Initiative founder Fatima Hassan questioned the feasibility of the Western Cape government’s plan to acquire its own vaccines.
“It is unfortunate that they are still creating this kind of false hope, because it is clear from the vaccine manufacturers that there are limited supplies and they will not for now deal with provincial departments or private entities, and will deal only with national governments. We would argue [vaccines] should go into a central pot, so prioritisation is based on your health need, rather than which province you live in,” Hassan said.
“Instead of dealing with the intellectual property reasons for why there are not enough supplies, and the fact that there is a self-created scarcity, they are playing politics. It is disingenuous to say you are trying to do something that you cannot. They cannot out-negotiate the pharmaceutical companies,” she added.
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