Mandatory vaccination involves, at a glance, the constitutional rights to bodily integrity, privacy, to protection against unfair discrimination and to freedom of thought, religion, conscience and opinion. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
No Covid-19 vaccination sites — in the public or in the private sector — are currently receiving the number of vaccine doses they have the capacity to administer. But this is about to change, as the country prepares to receive a large batch of new doses.
This is according to the health department’s deputy director general Nicholas Crisp, who said on Thursday that the government is under “a lot of pressure from both private and public site administrators” to get them the vaccines they require.
“It’s just about how many vaccines we have,” Crisp said on Thursday afternoon.
“So that is actually quite good news. Because when the large numbers of vaccines start arriving in the next couple of days, we are going to see a ramp-up across the board, which is very exciting.”
Crisp was talking at a virtual briefing, hosted by Business for South Africa (B4SA), on the role of the private sector in the country’s vaccine roll-out programme, which recently got a boost with the announcement that the US is shipping 5.6-million doses to the country.
Ramping up
On Sunday night, in his address to the nation, President Cyril Ramaphosa indicated that the government would significantly ramp up the rate of vaccinations in the coming weeks. According to the president, South Africa was administering more than 240 000 vaccines every week day.
Within the next two to three months, South Africa is set to receive around 31-million additional doses from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. “This supply pipeline means that there will be sufficient vaccine doses available for the rest of the year,” Ramaphosa said.
The government has upped vaccination capacity on weekends and in a month, people between the ages of 18 and 34 will be eligible to receive their jabs, Ramaphosa announced on Sunday.
During his address, the president announced the easing of harsher lockdown measures, put in place as the country’s hospitals buckled under the pressure of the pandemic’s third wave — driven by the doubly contagious Covid-19 Delta variant.
In the week leading up to Ramaphosa’s address, the average number of daily new infections was around 12 000 new cases a day, which represents a 20% drop from the week before. However, on Wednesday 28 July 17 351 new cases were reported.
South Africa’s slow delivery of vaccines has been flagged as a key impediment to the country’s economic growth, which has recently been hit by a week of civil unrest. To mitigate this risk, the national treasury has allocated an additional R5.3-billion to the department of health for additional vaccine purchases and logistical arrangements.
Speaking at Thursday’s briefing, B4SA chairperson Martin Kingston said the government, in partnership with the private sector, should be aiming to administer about 420 000 doses per day. By Thursday, more than seven-million vaccines had been administered, Kingston noted.
Until now, vaccination delivery has been very constrained, Kingston explained. But, he said, the doses from the US will start being administered by the end of next week and additional supplies of the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines will also start to flow into the system.
Easing the constraints
“We think that, bar the next couple of weeks, there should be no constraints in terms of being able to access adequate amounts of vaccines to administer. And we will see the rates going up,” Kingston said.
It is forecast that, by October, 80% of the adult population will have received their first dose. This can only be achieved by vaccinating an average of 365 000 people a day.
Together, the private and public sectors have capacity “well in excess” to administer the number of doses to meet this target, Kingston said. According to him, the private sector will be able to administer 300 000 doses per day. “We are fully committed to ensuring that we can maximise the throughput of the administration of the vaccine to as many of the adult population as possible before the onset of the fourth wave.”
B4SA co-convenor Cas Coovadia emphasised the importance of the partnership between the public and private sectors in bringing the pandemic under control. “From the onset of the pandemic early last year, what we have seen is the critical role that the private sector can play in bringing capacity, resources and expertise to bear in support of the government’s critical role.”
By forging a partnership between these two stakeholders, Coovadia said, “we can actually move forward as a country. And I think that we just need to recognise each other’s role.”
‘Under no illusions’
The speakers at the briefing stressed that now that vaccine supply constraints now seem to have eased, the focus needs to be on boosting demand.
On Wednesday, Afrobarometer released the results of a survey which found that seven in 10of the South Africans polled have little or no trust in the government’s ability to ensure that Covid-19 vaccines are safe. The independent research network interviewed 1 600 adult South Africans between May and June 2021 for the survey.
According to the survey: “A majority of South Africans say they are unlikely to try to get vaccinated. Close to half believe prayer is more effective than a vaccine in preventing Covid-19 infection.”
Responding to the survey’s results at Thursday’s briefing, Roger Baxter, the chief executive of the Minerals Council, said the mining industry is “under no illusions that there will be some anti-vaxxers” as it carries out its vaccination programme.
“We are dealing with it. It is very much part of the process … We are aware of that particular challenge. But that is just one survey and I think that we will make really good progress as the industry in getting most of the workers vaccinated.”
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