Johannesburg – Now that the first batch of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines has arrived in South Africa, work will begin in earnest to inoculate healthcare workers in the public and private sector.
Eight-thousand single-dose vaccines arrive at OR Tambo International Airport last night.
Scientists established the Sisonke Open-label Covid-19 Vaccine Programme in order to kickstart South Africa’s vaccination drive.
The programme will see 300,000 Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines arrive in the country over the next month.
Two hundred thousand more vials are expected to arrive at a later stage, once the initial batches have been administered.
According to Johnson trial co-lead, Professor Linda-Gail Bekker, healthcare workers would initially be inoculated at 17 sites across the country.
“We will be expanding that as time goes by, so progressive realisation as we develop our systems and increase our robustness. We’re starting in the big centres and when good numbers of those people are vaccinated we’ll be moving out in a progressive way.”
Bekker said that the vaccine offers protection against Covid-19, but to fast-track the rollout they had to do it via the Sisonke platform.
“Although it’s getting the name of research, it really isn’t, it’s evaluation we will be following up how people do on the vaccine in a very broad way, the way we would we do for our national programme anyway and we’ll be following them up to make sure that we get the expected outcome.”
Places where the first inoculation is set to take place include the Chris Hani Baragwanath, Tygerberg and Prince Mshiyeni Memorial hospitals.
