An emergency room doctor at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital gets his injection of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine. Picture: Jacques Nelles
The government is playing catch up on its national vaccination programme as the health department announced it will be revising the country’s vaccine strategy, nearly a month before its delayed roll out.
After having secured a 20 million doses deal with Pfizer and concluding a Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine agreement ahead of the long-awaited vaccine rollout planned for May, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said they had to revise the strategy for the vaccine programme.
“Upon deeper inspection and reflection, the department of health has worked on a revised strategy to ensure that the vaccination campaign targets the most pressing public health and economic relief that vaccinations should achieve. These revisions will require extensive yet urgent consultation to ensure the final programme expresses the will of the people,” Mkhize said on Tuesday night.
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The health department had planned on rolling out the second phase of the vaccine programme from 17 May to the end of July, targeting nearly 5.5 million people over the age of 60 years.
Health Ministry spokesperson Lwazi Manzi said the reasons for revising the strategy would be announced, but this would not delay the planned rollout plan.
“This will be announced formally in the same way we did a public briefing for Phase 1 inoculation detailing the process,” she said.
The strategy will include rolling out both the Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer vaccines, Manzi said.
But the revision could be due to not achieving the original goals set out by the government, said Professor Glenda Davison, head of the biometric sciences department at Cape Peninsula University.
The country was nowhere near vaccinating the 1 million people the government had aimed to achieve by the end of March, she said. Revising the strategy could mean running parallel programmes to vaccinate healthcare workers and the vulnerable simultaneously, she said.
“The old strategy of completing phase one and then going onto phase two and so on will have to be changed. I imagine that as the number of vaccines being manufactured increase and become available – expected in the middle of April – these phases may have to run parallel with each other. They will have to start vaccinating the vulnerable and essential workers in phase 2 while they continue with healthcare workers. This will assist in ramping up the speed at which the vaccines can be administered,” she said.
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What is of concern, however, is the manner in which priority groups are being designated as it appears high risk groups are no longer being prioritised first. This is after calls for politicians to form part of the second phase of the vaccination, said Professor Alex van den Heever, chair of social security systems administration and management at Wits University.
“It appears that we are no longer prioritising high risk groups first, but legitimising queue jumping by politicians regardless of their risk status. Phase two is becoming a jumble of special interests,” he said.
“Other countries have gone from oldest first in 10-year age categories and people with comorbidities. Those politicians who fall into these categories need to be vaccinated in phase two legitimately. But politicians are not a priority group,” he said.
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