JOHANNESBURG (AP) – South Africa will start giving the next approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine to its frontline health workers next week as a study to see what protection it offers against COVID-19, especially against the variant that is there, said the Minister of Health. Wednesday.
Zweli Mkhize said that South Africa had scrapped plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because it could not prevent light to moderate disease.
The one-shot J&J vaccine is still being tested internationally and has not been approved in any country.
But Mkhize, in a national broadcast, stated that the vaccine is safe, depending on tests performed on 44,000 people in South Africa, the United States and Latin America.
The J&J vaccine will be used to start the first phase of South Africa’s campaign in which the 1.25 million health workers of the country will be vaccinated, he said, adding that the workers will be closely monitored.
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is effective against the 501Y.V2 variant and the necessary approval processes for use in South Africa are underway,” he said. The J&J vaccine has already been tested in South Africa in clinical trials. done and is manufactured here under production of J&J.
The shots will be followed by a campaign to vaccinate about 40 million people in South Africa by the end of the year. The country will also use the Pfizer vaccine and others, possibly the Russian Sputnik V, Chinese Synopharm and Moderna vaccines, Mkhize said.
South Africa has purchased 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, and the first million doses arrived this month. The first AstraZeneca shots were intended for front-line health workers.
The locally dominant variant is more contagious and has caused a revival of COVID-19 that caused almost twice the cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the initial recovery of the disease in South Africa.
South Africa and many other African and poor countries have looked to the AstraZeneca vaccine because it is cheaper and does not need to be stored in cold freezers. It is also manufactured in large quantities in India for shipment elsewhere.
An additional complication for South Africa is that the doses of AstraZeneca arrived with the expiration date on 30 April. South Africa wants to exchange them, Mkhize said.
South Africa confirmed by far the largest number of COVID-19 cases on the African continent with almost 1.5 million, including almost 47,000 deaths. This represents 41% of the total for all 54 countries in Africa.
After a surge that rose in early January, cases and deaths are now declining, but medical experts are already warning that South Africa must prepare for a new surge in May or June, the beginning of the winter of the Southern Hemisphere.