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By Reuters 
4h ago
By Alexander Winning
JOHANNESBURG – South Africa is going with the global distribution scheme for the COVAX COVID-19 vaccine, with a committed purchase for 10% of its population of 58 million, a senior health official said Tuesday.
Khadija Jamaloodien, director of affordable medicines at the Health Ministry, told Reuters that South Africa had not yet signed the pledge agreement to participate in COVAX, but would do so once officials had completed the necessary administrative processes.
He said the facility would give the country an early batch of vaccines with which to start protecting people.
“We have to be strategic about how we do this, because the intention is to cover a greater proportion of the population,” he said.
“Initially the strategy is to protect the vulnerable, the vulnerable include our health workers and then those we will identify as priority groups.”
The decision followed previous advice from a group of experts.
The government has publicly expressed its support for COVAX, but had yet to say how much of the population it would seek to cover through the World Health Organization co-run facility, and whether it would opt for the committed, rather than optional, arrangement of purchase.
South Africa will make a payment of 500 million rand (or 33 million dollars) to help finance the production of vaccines that will be available through the facility, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni said on Tuesday.
Mboweni told a conference that another 4.5 billion rand might be needed to purchase vaccines in the future, without specifying how they would be spent.
The government is trying to keep its options open as it evaluates which vaccine will be most effective locally and most affordable.
As an upper-middle-income country, South Africa does not qualify for subsidized vaccines under COVAX, unlike many other African countries.
But health advocates say countries in this group also lack the diplomatic clout to shape the scheme in their favor, unlike wealthy nations that pay larger sums, leaving them at a double disadvantage.
South Africa had to weigh the benefits of signing up for the scheme versus agreeing to bilateral deals with major drug companies, or waiting to see which vaccines proved to be the most effective in late-stage clinical trials, an official close to the vaccine discussions told Reuters. of the government.
The country has recorded the highest number of coronavirus infections on the African continent, with more than 760,000 confirmed cases and more than 20,000 deaths to date.
It imposed one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in March to contain the virus, exacerbating pre-existing economic woes.
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