Ramaphosa announces new J&J deal
PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa says South Africa will now have access to 30 million Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Covid-19 vaccines, while more than 200 million doses will be produced for Africa.
Ramaphosa said J&J signed off on the deal with Aspen Pharmacare this week.
The vaccines will be manufactured at the Aspen facility in the Eastern Cape. Ramaphosa said the first few J&J vaccines would come out of the facility in the coming weeks.
“Availability is a challenge that all countries in the world are going through. A number of countries in Africa thought that they would start earlier, but availability is a major challenge.
“And part of the reason why we have come here is to ensure we speed up the process of the availability of our vaccines,” he said.
He added that from April we should see an acceleration in the roll-out of vaccines throughout the country.
Earlier in the day, Ramaphosa led a government delegation on an oversight visit to Aspen’s new facility.
Ramaphosa has defended his administration’s slow pace in getting the Covid-19 vaccine widely distributed.
He said his ministers had bloodshot eyes from working around the clock to get the J&J vaccines rolled out.
“What we are focusing on is acquiring vaccines so that we can save lives. The slow pace of the roll-out is given rise to by the challenge of the availability of vaccines confronting countries around the world. We have come here to ensure we speed up the process,” he said.
Meanwhile it was also announced yesterday that J&J would supply the AU with up to 400 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine beginning in the third quarter, as the continent is grappling with vaccinating 60% of its people.
The virus has killed almost 121 000 people across Africa and infected 4.18 million. Reuters reported that J&J unit Janssen Pharmaceutica NV had entered into a deal with the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (Avat) to deliver 220 million doses of its single-dose shot.
Avat could order an additional 180 million doses through 2022.
The deal follows months of negotiations with the AU, which announced a provisional agreement in January to buy 270 million doses of vaccines from J&J, AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech.
The status of the talks with the other two companies is not known.
“J&J requires just a single dose, it makes it very good programmatically to roll out,” said John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the price of the dose was likely to be $10 (R148).
Avat said yesterday that many of the AU’s 55 member states had shown a strong preference for J&J.
“We need to immunise at least 60% of our population. The J&J agreement enables us to move towards achieving this target,” Nkengasong said.
As part of the AU’s vaccine plan, the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has approved up to $2 billion for countries to buy shots via the AU.