The government is poised to destroy more than 92,000 doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine that expire at the end of March, after failing to shore up enough public demand for the jabs or find a way to donate them to other countries before they reach the end of their shelf life.
In February the government announced it was shortening the interval between Pfizer shots and would allow people to get Pfizer boosters regardless of whether they had Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson (J&J) jabs as their primary regimen. While the policy change drove an uptick in demand, it was insufficient to use up all the shots that expire on March 31, and 92,370 Pfizer doses will be destroyed at the end of this week, according to the department of health.
The government has a further 11.58-million Pfizer shots, of which 897,270 doses expire at the end of May, 5.846-million at the end of June and 4.832-million at the end of July.
The department’s Khadija Jamaloodien said it is hard to predict how many more Pfizer doses will be lost to expiry as it is difficult to forecast demand. The government administered an average of 41,720 Pfizer shots a day for the past week, and an average of 348,301 doses per week over the past month.
Business Day calculates it would take until the end of November for the government to use up its Pfizer stockpile if it continues at the rate of 1.39-million shots a month. It is time the government does not have.
Jamaloodien said SA proposed donating or swapping stock with the World Health Organization-backed vaccine-sharing scheme Covax, but had yet to receive a response.
“The stock cannot easily be donated because the recipient country will need to comply with the storage requirements of the vaccine, as well as the contractual terms related to the no-fault compensation [scheme],” she said.
University of KwaZulu-Natal public health professor Mosa Moshabela said SA should have tried harder to donate the Pfizer shots, given the importance the government places on vaccine equity. “We knew more than a month ago that vaccines would expire in March. They could have made arrangements to give them to other countries,” he said.
Jamaloodien said the vaccines to be destroyed this week represent just 0.24% of the Pfizer shots SA has received and are worth between R13m and R14m.
Government figures show 26.7-million (66.5%) of SA’s
40.1-million adults have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or J&J vaccine, meaning about a third have yet to receive a single jab.
Rather than pushing vaccine mandates, the government has tried to increase demand with mass communication campaigns and incentives.
Last year it offered R200 grocery vouchers to encourage people over the age of 50 to get jabbed, followed by a cash prize lucky draw that was open to first-time vaccinees of all ages.
In a fresh bid to incentivise people to get vaccinated, the government is now working on a scheme to offer free data to new vaccine recipients.
The initiative has already won the support of MTN, and discussions are under way with Cell-C and Vodacom.
“Imagine if anybody could get 1GB of free data, regardless of network operator. Surveys show a third of people are willing to get vaccinated tomorrow, and half of those who are willing say if they were paid R100 they would do it,” said DG Murray Trust CEO David Harrison, who previously led the department of health’s vaccine demand acceleration strategy.
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