An estimated 3.3m Pfizer jabs from South Africa’s stock of 30m Covid vaccines are due to expire tomorrow, with another 26m doses expiring at the end of April.
Roughly 8m of the vaccines are from Johnson & Johnson: the rest are Pfizer, reports Health-E News.
The National Department of Health (NDoH) says that if unused, the expired vaccines won’t be discarded. Instead, the department will apply to the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra) for an extension assessment.
Currently, no stored stock that has expired. The department periodically applies to the regulator for the extension of the expiry date based on stability testing. In this way, none of the unused vaccines is disposed of, even after the expiry date, while the department awaits further applications and approvals for extensions.
The country’s total wastage so far is at 1.5% and varies from one region to another, depending on the month and on the ratio of public to private usage. Currently, no province has exceeded 2% wastage.
Although South Africa has been trying to donate vaccines since last year, no African countries are interested, with many of them, instead, trying to donate to South Africa.
Efforts to exit vaccine procurement agreements have been largely successful with Covax but not at all with Janssen (J&J).
Booster shots
With just more than 38m vaccines administered in the whole vaccination period, the country still sits below the target of 70% of the population being jabbed. Only 4.2m people have come forward for booster doses, including people who are developing severe diseases and who are most in need of the shots.
Professor of Vaccinology at Wits University Shabir Madhi said reasons for the low uptake include that “infection with the virus has resulted in less severe disease due to extensive infection”.
“When people get infected now, they’re less likely to develop severe disease from the virus.”
And booster uptake, he added, was moving slowly “due to the improper messaging as to what the benefits are, when to get it, and who specifically would benefit most”.
“The messaging to the public doesn’t ensure that those people who will benefit the most are actually mobilised to come forward for boosters.”
Part of the problem in the vaccine roll-out was that the Health Department was not very strategic in how it should target who should be vaccinated, said Madhi.
“We focused on chasing after the numbers. We continued increasing the pool of people who can be vaccinated, without really reflecting whether we are efficient in how we’re using our vaccines.”
Nor did the department sort out the logistics of vaccine education and distribution, and by the time the vaccines became available to the country, the peak in the Delta wave had already passed.
“Unfortunately, that we now have millions of doses due to expire is a failure on the part of the government to adequately strategise the roll-out and to actually get them into the hands of people who require them timeously,” he said
Data still show that people at a higher risk of developing severe disease require more frequent booster doses.
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