SA’s COVID-19 vaccine blunder – what happens next?

Now that it’s been learnt that the 1.5 million COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine doses that government secured will be, to some degree, useless, what is the plan? The vaccines were set to be received by provinces this week to get the rollout going, however Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize has said they’d be pumping the brakes on that for now.

As if that wasn’t enough, the AstraZeneca doses, which touched down in South Africa exactly a week ago, have a limited shelf life and are due to expire in April 2021, which means government has about two months to give the jabs to healthcare workers.

Mkhize along with a panel of experts held a briefing on Sunday, 7 February 2021, discussing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines – against new variants of the disease.

Wits University’s Prof Shabir Madhi said studies were done in the wake of the new variant, known as 501y.v2 – which showed it was not statistically significantly effective against mild or moderate infection of COVID-19.

The minister has said, however, that despite the setback, the overall COVID-19 vaccine rollout will proceed this week.

“From next week for the next four weeks we expect that there will be J&J vaccines, there will be Pfizer vaccines. So what will be available to the health workers will be those vaccines,” he said.

When will the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine rollout begin?

Well, it’s now back to the drawing board for the country’s top health experts as they now have to weigh their options and find a way forward. Mkhize said he was confident they’d be able to come up with a solution on how to navigate this conundrum.

“I’ve directed that our scientists must, quickly, sit together and figure out what approach we are going to use in order to effectively deploy the AstraZeneca vaccine. It must be clear when that could be done, what conditions need to be fulfilled, what we need to do about all of this. That is the assignment that is given to our scientists. They’ll figure it out,” Mkhize said.

“So it’s a temporary issue that we have to hold on to AstraZeneca. It is temporary until we figure out these issues [and] what are the next steps supposed to be then we bring it back,”

The variant first discovered in the Eastern Cape in November 2020 and was found to be 50% more infectious than the original virus. It has since been detected in at least 30 other countries.