Economics Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema says his party can no longer tolerate lockdowns when people’s health and livelihoods are at stake. He has urged government to speed up the vaccination process and avert stricter lockdowns.
Malema and his deputy, Floyd Shivhambu, led a protest march to the health product regulatory authority, SAHPRA, in Pretoria yesterday. They want SAHPRA to speed up the approval of COVID-19 vaccines and have accused the regulator of being selective in the drugs they allow on the market.
“We are not going to listen to nonsense which says Spuknik needs to meet certain criteria before it gets approved. There’s an emergency application that was made a month ago. SAHPRA is not approving though their mandate is clear to regulate and not to get into these things between pharmaceutical companies and politicians. We know there’s an agenda beyond their mandate. We know the relationship between [President] Cyril Ramaphosa and Aspen.”
Meanwhile, Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Innovation at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Professor Mosa Moshabela says even if the vaccines were to be approved by SAHPRA, it is not responsible for procuring the vaccinations. He says procurement is not processed by the regulatory authority. Professor Moshabela says SAHPRA needs to have the independence to review the vaccines to assess their safety, efficacy and quality, to ensure that they will work for South Africans.
“The vaccines that are approved have been demonstrated in South Africa towards the variant that is here. Now if we have vaccines that are going to be submitted to SAHPRA for approval but have not been demonstrated to work against the dominant variant here in SA, I don’t understand how anyone should be able to put pressure on SAHPRA to approve that.”
