SA finalising sale of vaccines to AU

South Africa is finalising the sale of one million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the African Union (AU).

The sale will come cheap, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize has revealed.

Mkhize addressed the National Press Club on Thursday. He told the briefing local scientists were still working on research regarding the efficacy of the vaccine.

“We had ordered 1.5 million vaccines and discovered [later] there were challenges that needed to be looked at. Our scientists are still researching them. In the meantime, we have offered one million of them to the AU platform.

“The AU will buy it at the same cost we spent at the Serum Institute [of India]. Our legal team are finalising the agreement between us and the AU before they are released to various countries,” Mkhize said.

Mkhize said the AstraZeneca vaccine had not been used in SA.

“We are only going to use them once we get a clear guide from our scientists. Some African countries don’t have the variant that we have here and they can still utilise AstraZeneca,” he said. Mkhize added they were not resting on their laurels after seeing a rapid decline in the number of Covid-19 cases.

“From 20 000 reports that we received a day, we [now] get about 1 000 to 1 500 a day. Those numbers are still high. We are also looking at the positivity rate, including how many people out of 100 are testing positive.

“The numbers are going down but we must continue with containment measures, including wearing of masks, sanitising of hands and social distancing,” said Mkhize.