The health minister said that South Africa would instead give Johnson & Johnson’s unapproved vaccine to frontline health professionals.
South Africa has ruled out plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and will instead inoculate its frontline healthcare professionals with the Johnson & Johnson’s unapproved jab, the country’s health minister announced in Wednesday.
Zweli Mkhize said vaccinations will begin next week as a study to see what protection it provides against COVID-19, particularly against the dominant variant in South Africa.
J&J vaccines will be used to launch the first phase of the vaccination campaign in which 1.25 million health workers in the country will be inoculated, he said.
He said the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was discarded because it “does not prevent mild to moderate disease” from the variant that has spread widely in South Africa.
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.
Mkhize declared that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is safe [File: Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters]
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has proven to be effective against the 501Y.V2 variant (dominant in South Africa) and the approval processes required for use in South Africa are underway,” said Mkhize.
“The implementation of vaccination will continue in the form of an implementation study in partnership with the Medical Research Council and vaccination sites of the National Health Department across the country.
“This will provide valuable information about the pandemic in the post-vaccination community and will thus ensure the early identification of emerging infections, if they occur among vaccinated health professionals.”
These vaccines will be followed by a campaign to vaccinate about 40 million people in South Africa by the end of the year.
South Africa will use the Pfizer vaccine and others, possibly including the Russian Sputnik V and the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine, said Mkhize.