More vaccines on the way – Mkhize

HEALTH Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize has announced that the country will acquire more vaccine doses to fight Covid-19 after two pharmaceutical companies confirmed the delivery of 51 million doses.

Mkhize said Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) would supply the country with the 51million doses in the next few months. He said J&J had confirmed that South Africa would receive 1million doses this month.

Speaking at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital yesterday, Mkhize said it was expected that J&J would be in a position to deliver the batch around April 22-24. He said the doses would be delivered from the Aspen Plant in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape, and the advantage of this was a shortened period between dispatch from the plant and delivery to vaccination centres.

He added: “It also gives me pleasure to indicate that J&J has expressed its intent to deliver a subsequent batch of about 900000 doses in May and June and we expect a date and exact volumes to be firmed up in the next week or two.” Mkhize said this batch may be coming from Belgium.

“Although this does increase the time from dispatch to site delivery by a few days, we will not feel the impact of this as we will already be rolling with the vaccinations at that stage,” he said.

Mkhize confirmed that a refund had been received from the Serum Institute for the 500 000 additional doses of AstraZeneca that did not arrive in South Africa.

He said they had managed to salvage the AstraZeneca situation: the 1 million doses received were sold to the AU and distributed to African countries which had now been able to access vaccines through this process.

Mkhize said the country had secured 31million doses of the onedose vaccine. “We can achieve the target of vaccinating approximately 250 000-270 000 citizens a day at our peak, thus reaching population immunity within the period of a year,” the minister said.