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The Covax vaccine to be delivered to South Africa in the first half of 2021, will only be enough to cover 3% of the population, reports City Press.
The deputy director general of health, Dr. Anban Pillay, said in a webinar that each of the 190 countries that will receive the vaccine will only receive enough to cover 3% of their population in this period.
This is somewhat below President Cyril Ramaphosa’s original expectation of a 10% national coronavirus vaccination by July 2021.
According to the report, front-line workers in the public and private sectors will be the first to receive the vaccine when it becomes available.
While countries can request doses directly from vaccine developers, South Africa has lagged behind.
It comes after Health Minister Dr. Zweli Mkhize reported 10,939 new cases Saturday night and 254 new deaths in the past 24 hours, as the virus continues its second wave of infection.
# COVID-19 Statistics in SA as of December 19.
Use the COVID Alert SA app to protect yourself, your loved ones, and your community. Start using this privacy-preserving app today! Add your phone to the fight! Download the Covid Alert SA app now! https://t.co/8YKEqaiiRF pic.twitter.com/CfkCUpbn0q
– Dr. Zweli Mkhize (@DrZweliMkhize) December 19, 2020
He told City Press that the vaccines are expected to work against the new strain of Covid-19 that recently arrived in South Africa.
Deadline missed
The government has been criticized for failing to meet its first payment deadline to secure Covid-19 vaccines on December 15.
The payment, which is a deposit to insure the Covax vaccines, comprises R327 million and will be made in the coming days from the Solidarity Fund.
The Solidarity Fund recently told Bloomberg that it would make the payment as soon as it gets approval from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, which Covax runs.
While the fund will pay the initial deposit, this is only 15% of the R2.2 billion that will ultimately need to be paid for Covax vaccines.
The government has not yet declared where the balance of these funds will be obtained.
New Covid-19 variant
Dr Mkhize also announced this week that genomics scientists in South Africa have identified a variant of the SARS-COV-2 (Covid-19) virus, currently referred to as ‘Variant 501.V2’.
He said a genomics team, led by the Kwazulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, or KRISP, has sequenced hundreds of samples from across the country since the start of the pandemic in March.
They noted that one particular variant has increasingly dominated the findings from samples collected in the past two months.
In addition, clinicians have been providing anecdotal evidence of a change in the epidemiological clinical picture, in particular noting that they are seeing a higher proportion of younger patients without comorbidities presenting with critical illness.
The evidence that has been collected, therefore, strongly suggests that the current second wave we are experiencing is being driven by this new variant.
Explaining the findings, Professor Salim Abdool Karim said the second wave is showing some early signs that it is spreading faster than the first wave.
“It is still very early, but at this stage, preliminary data suggests that the virus that now dominates in the second wave is spreading faster than the first wave. It is not clear if the second wave has more or less deaths, in other words, the severity is still not very clear.
“Hopefully it is a less severe virus, but we have no clear evidence at this time. We have not seen red flags in our current information on deaths, ”he said.
“We had all these different strains that were routinely spread in South Africa during our first wave and beyond. What became quite different from what we were not expecting is how quickly this variant has become dominant in South Africa. “
This particular virus has three mutations in the receptor-binding domain, which is the actual part of the virus that attaches itself to the human cell. One of the interpretations of these changes is that the affinity for the ACE2 receptor increases, he said.
“The other two possible mutations add some potential antibody escape, but the full implications of combining the three mutations still need to be understood in more detail.”
Karim said the new variant has increased the viral load in the body. He said that there are still many issues that need to be investigated.
“We don’t know where it came from and we don’t know why it was formed. We found the first one in Nelson Mandela Bay, but we don’t know if it originated in Nelson Mandela Bay. It’s too early to tell if it’s more serious. “
Mkhize said there is no evidence to suggest the need for a change in the clinical treatment and patient management of Covid-19 in the second wave to date and that this discovery does not require additional restrictive measures.
Read: What happens when Covid-19 vaccines become available in South Africa?
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