JOHANNESBURG (AP) – South Africa will give the unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine to its frontline healthcare professionals starting next week as a study to see what protection it provides from COVID-19, particularly against the dominant variant there, said the minister of health Wednesday
Zweli Mkhize said that South Africa rejected plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because it “does not prevent mild to moderate disease” of the variant.
The J&J one-shot vaccine is still being tested internationally and has not been approved in any country.
But Mkhize, in a nationally broadcast speech, declared that the vaccine is safe, counting tests on 44,000 people in South Africa, the United States and Latin America.
The J&J vaccine will be used to launch the first phase of South Africa’s campaign, in which 1.25 million health workers in the country will be inoculated, he said, adding that workers will be monitored closely.
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has proven to be effective against the 501Y.V2 variant and the necessary approval processes for use in South Africa are underway,” he said. The J&J vaccine is in clinical trials in South Africa and is in production here, under contract from J&J.
These vaccines will be followed by a campaign to vaccinate about 40 million people in South Africa by the end of the year. The country will also use the Pfizer vaccine and others, possibly including the Russian Sputnik V, Chinese Sinopharm and Moderna vaccines, said Mkhize.
South Africa purchased 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, produced by the Serum Institute of India, and the first million doses arrived this month. The first injections of AstraZeneca were aimed at frontline healthcare professionals.
The locally dominant variant is more contagious and has led to the resurgence of COVID-19, which caused almost twice as many cases, hospitalizations and deaths as occurred in the initial outbreak of the disease in South Africa.
South Africa and many other African and poor countries have resorted to the AstraZeneca vaccine because it is cheaper and does not require storage in deep-frozen freezers. It is also being produced in large quantities in India for shipment elsewhere.
An additional complication for South Africa is that its doses of AstraZeneca arrived with an expiration date of 30 April. South Africa is looking to exchange them, said Mkhize.
South Africa has by far the largest number of COVID-19 cases on the African continent, with almost 1.5 million confirmed, including almost 47,000 deaths. This represents 41% of the total of all 54 nations in Africa.
After a resurgence that skyrocketed in early January, cases and deaths are declining, but medical experts are already warning that South Africa must prepare for another outbreak in May or June, the beginning of winter in the southern hemisphere.