JOHANNESBURG (AP) – South Africa will give Johnson & Johnson unapproved vaccine to its frontline healthcare workers from next week as a study to see what protection it provides against COVID-19, particularly against the dominant variant there , said the Minister of Health. Wednesday.
Zweli Mkhize said South Africa has rejected plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because it “does not prevent mild to moderate disease” of the variant.
The single-shot J&J vaccine is still being tested internationally and has not been approved in any country.
But Mkhize, in a national outreach address, said the vaccine is safe, based on tests of 44,000 people conducted in South Africa, the United States and Latin America.
The J&J vaccine will be used to launch the first phase of the South African campaign in which 1.25 million health workers in the country will be inoculated, he said, adding that workers will be closely monitored.
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been shown to be effective against the 501Y.V2 variant and the approval processes required for use in South Africa are underway,” he said. The J&J vaccine has been in clinical trials in South Africa and is in production here, under contract from J&J.
These traits will be followed by a campaign to vaccinate approximately 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 Sinopharm and Moderna vaccines, Mkhize said.
South Africa had purchased 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, produced by the Serum Institute of India, and the first million doses arrived this month. The first features of AstraZeneca had been designed for front-line toilets.
The locally dominant variant is more contagious and caused a resurgence of COVID-19 that caused almost twice as many cases, hospitalizations and deaths experienced in the initial increase in the disease in South Africa.
South Africa and many other poor African countries had looked at the AstraZeneca vaccine as it is cheaper and does not require storage in ultra-cold freezers. It is also being produced in large quantities in India to ship them elsewhere.
An additional complication for South Africa is that their doses of AstraZeneca arrived with an expiration date of 30 April. South Africa wants to change them, Mkhize said.
South Africa has by far the largest number of COVID-19 cases on the African continent, with nearly 1.5 million confirmed, including nearly 47,000 deaths. This represents 41% of the total of the 54 nations of Africa.
Following a resurgence that increased in early January, cases and deaths are declining now, but medical experts are already warning that South Africa should prepare for a new rise in May or June, the start of the winter of the southern hemisphere.