Doctor Ridhwaan Suliman of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) says South Africa needs to improve significantly on the speed of its coronavirus vaccine roll out to achieve herd immunity.
Currently only healthcare workers are being vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine with the next phase of the rollout to essential workers, the elderly and people with co-morbidities only expected to start at the end of next month.
On Thursday about 183 000 healthcare workers have been vaccinated but immunisations at some sites had to be suspended because of a delay in the delivery of the third batch of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Seventy-thousand doses arrived on Saturday. Suliman says the global vaccine shortage poses a huge challenge:
“We do have a number of doses that are on order approximately 40 million are on the pipeline, when they will arrive and administered, I think that’s the question, there is a global vaccine shortage.
Until we start a wider vaccine roll out, that continues to be the problem, if can acquire enough doses, I am sure the speed and the number of doses that we will administer will pick up. I think reaching the threshold of herd immunity by the end of the year is probably a bit too optimistic.”
In this video below, WHO lament the lack of access to COVID-19 vaccines in developing countries:
Earlier Health Minister, Zweli Mkhize, confirmed that government has concluded its sale of one million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine that arrived in the country in the middle of last month.
