First locally made vaccines ready for rollout

● Aspen Pharmacare was due to release the first 1.1-million doses of the Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) coronavirus vaccine for the South African market this weekend, coinciding with the resumption of the vaccine rollout after it was temporarily halted.

Stavros Nicolaou, Aspen’s senior executive for strategic trade, this week confirmed the first 1.1-million doses that were due for release on 24 April will be for SA.

Aspen is making the vaccines at its facility in Gqeberha, in the Eastern Cape, one of several facilities globally that are producing J&J vaccines.

Nicolaou said as part of the J&J contract, 50% of the vaccines from the facility will be “kept on African soil”. He said the first batch of vaccines was due to be released yesterday.

The J&J vaccine rollout in SA is resuming after it was halted when six people in the US who received the shots suffered blood clots.

The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra) said last weekend that J&J vaccinations would continue, but with new conditions including strengthening the screening and monitoring of those who may be at high risk for the blood-clotting disorder.

The rollout of the J&J vaccine has yet to resume in the US and Europe.

The vaccine programme in SA is still limited to health-care workers but from May 17 people over 60 will become eligible. Other groups with high priority include essential workers and adults with co-morbidities.

Milani Wolmarans, the acting COO of the department of health, said 818,927 healthcare workers and 422,895 people older than 60 have so far registered on the electronic vaccination data system (EVDS), and almost 300,000 health-care workers have been vaccinated.

Those already registered are required to go back to the EVDS portal to get information sheets on potential side-effects and to agree to new consent forms that will be updated to “include the newly identified adverse events”, said Wolmarans.

Analysts said the vaccine contract Aspen signed with J&J in November last year was fortuitous for the JSE-listed company. The facility in Gqeberha, completed in 2017, had been built at a cost of R3bn to manufacture anaesthetics but has yet to start doing so.

Carmen Mpelwane, portfolio manager at Absa Asset Management, said Aspen had been in “the right place, with the right facilities at the right time”.

The J&J contract was a bonus for the business, because the facility had not had a pipeline of products ready for manufacture, she said.

Aspen has not disclosed what it will earn from the J&J contract. J&J did not respond to requests for comment.

Alec Abraham, senior equity analyst at Sasfin Wealth, said the vaccine contract would have a huge impact on Aspen, “at least covering the fixed costs” of the new facility.

The price of the J&J shots has not yet been disclosed.

Ronald Whelan, chief commercial officer at Discovery Health, said he hoped to have a figure in the next few days. The final cost of the vaccine will be determined by the department of health.

Bloomberg reported that SA has contracted private companies to help with importing and distributing Covid vaccines.

The government has awarded tenders to state-backed Biovac and Imperial Logistics to import an unspecified number of doses, the department of health said on its website. DSV Healthcare was contracted to store and distribute the vaccines in SA.

The government ordered 30-million doses of the two-dose vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, which with the J&J shots should be sufficient to inoculate more than two-thirds of SA’s 60-million population and achieve herd immunity.

The rollout of the J&J vaccine to the public next month comes after the government settled a contractual dispute with the US drugmaker. The outstanding matters relating to the order for 31-million doses were resolved “without compromising the position of SA”, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, an acting minister in the presidency, told reporters after the cabinet’s bimonthly meeting this week.

Health minister Zweli Mkhize told parliament last week that the terms insisted on by the company were at times “unreasonable”.