The health minister said South Africa will instead give an unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine to primary care health workers.
South Africa has scrapped plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and will instead vaccinate its primary care health workers with the unapproved Johnson & Johnson shot, the country’s health minister announced Wednesday.
Zweli Mkhize said the vaccinations will begin next week as a study to see what protection it offers against COVID-19, particularly the variant that is dominant in South Africa.
The J&J vaccines will be used to launch the first phase of the vaccination program that will inoculate the country’s 1.25 million health workers, he said.
He said the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was dropped because it “does not prevent mild to moderate disease” of the variant that has spread widely in South Africa.
The one-shot J&J vaccine is still undergoing international testing and is not approved in any country.
But Mkhize stated in a nationally broadcast address that the vaccine is safe and relies on tests on 44,000 people in South Africa, the United States and Latin America.
Mkhize stated that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is safe [File: Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters]
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been shown to be effective against the 501Y.V2 variant (dominant in South Africa) and the necessary approval processes for use in South Africa are underway,” Mkhize said.
“The rollout of vaccination will take the form of an implementation study in conjunction with the Medical Research Council and the National Department of Health vaccination sites across the country.
“This will provide valuable information about the pandemic in the post-vaccination community and thus allow early identification of breakthrough infections as they arise among vaccinated health professionals.”
Those vaccines will be followed by a campaign to vaccinate an estimated 40 million people in South Africa by the end of the year.
South Africa will use the Pfizer vaccine and others, possibly including Russia’s Sputnik V and Chinese Sinopharm vaccine, Mkhize said.