The national health department is proposing that the government stop providing coronavirus vaccines to specific sectors of the economy and switch to a solely age-based system for determining who is eligible for a shot.
Such an approach would be in line with that originally proposed by Business for SA, which has consistently said age-based stratification would be the simplest and fairest way to go.
The government is currently offering Covid-19 vaccines to people aged 35 and older, along with people working in key sectors such as basic education and security. This multipronged strategy had proven administratively cumbersome and time-consuming, said acting health minister Mmamoloko Kubayi.
“It is not efficient, it is not effective, and it removes us from ensuring we move in terms of the mass rollout and get the numbers we want,” she told parliament’s portfolio committee on health on Wednesday night.
She was planning to present a proposal to the interministerial committee on Covid-19 to scrap the current strategy and focus on expanding vaccination coverage by age group, she said.
“We believe that is the most efficient way of rolling out. It is less administration, but also removes the burden of saying who do you prioritise first and why,” she said.
The health department has come under intense pressure to open vaccination to various groups, including those classified as essential workers in the lockdown regulations.
“There is a call for media personnel to come through. Others will say the religious sector, others the retail sector, and others petrol attendants. And others will say we have municipalities, dealing with services,” said Kubayi.
Verifying people’s employment was not always straightforward, particularly for those working in the informal sector. “We are trying to find mechanisms that are inclusive and give all South Africans the opportunity to be vaccinated,” she said.
By Wednesday evening, the government had provided 5.83- million Covid-19 jabs, 1.07-million of them the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, which have been earmarked for groups such as healthcare workers and teachers. A total of 4.76-million Pfizer-BioNTech doses had been administered, 958,675 of which were the second shot, taking the tally of fully vaccinated people to just over two-million.
To date, more than 870,000 of the 5.8-million doses have gone to people working in health, education and security services such as the army and police, according to the health department’s deputy director-general for national health insurance Nicholas Crisp.
Western Cape head of health Keith Cloete said the government’s vaccine strategy had clearly set out that phase 2, which began on May 17, would target people aged 60 years and above, then those aged 50 years and above, followed by those aged between 40 and 49 years. At the same time, it would provide vaccines to essential workers over the age of 40 years. But that approach was muddied when the government unexpectedly opened vaccination to people aged 35 and older on July 15.
“It is administratively cumbersome to create parallel special groups. It is administratively easier to just say everybody over the age of 35 can be registered and should be vaccinated as part of the programme. We have been one of the provinces to appeal to national department to not continue to have special groups,” he said.
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