JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa hopes to get some doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine around this weekend, a senior health official said Monday, after he stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine due to frustration test data.
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccination was quite appropriate at this stage, Ministry of Health Deputy General Director Anban Pillay told state broadcaster SABC, but did not say how many doses the country would soon receive .
Earlier, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the country had received 9 million doses of J&J expected to start arriving in the second quarter.
The J&J vaccine is not yet authorized for use in South Africa, although the US company has initiated a “follow-up application” with local regulator SAHPRA.
Pillay said the J&J vaccine had been shown in tests to be very effective in preventing hospitalization and death, and said it was an advantage that it was a one-shot vaccine. could be stored at refrigerator temperature.
“So we think it’s going to be a good vaccine at the moment for South Africa,” he said.
On Sunday, the government said it was temporarily suspending a major rollout of AstraZeneca vaccine to health care workers after preliminary data from a clinical trial found it provided “very little protection”. against moderate to severe disease caused by the major 501Y.V2 variable coronavirus in South Africa.
The trial did not evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine against severe disease, and their findings were not reviewed by peers.
AstraZeneca, which developed the vaccine with Oxford University, says it believes its vaccine can protect against serious disease and has already started modifying it against the 501Y.V2 version.
Asked if the AstraZeneca test sample size was large enough to make decisions, Pillay said: “I don’t think we can be confident in saying that the vaccine won’t work, but we don’t have the data either. to say it will definitely work. What we have are possible signs. “
He said the government needed a “broader debate” with local and global scientists to interpret the test data and say how best to proceed.
South Africa – which reported the highest number of confirmed coronavirus diseases in Africa and more than 46,000 coronavirus-related deaths – hopes to vaccinate 40 million people, or two-thirds of the population, to achieve a level of herd immunity.
Reciting with Alexander Winning; Edited by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Susan Fenton