The first million doses of Covid-19 vaccines to protect healthcare workers across Africa will be delivered from next week, said the director of the Africa CDC, Dr John Nkengasong, on Thursday.
SA began vaccinating health care workers on Wednesday with the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, which has a 57% efficacy against the coronavirus variant 501Y.V2 which is dominant in the country. To date 10 African countries have reported this infectious variant: Botswana, Comoros, DRC, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, SA and Zambia.
The 501Y.V1 variant has been detected in eight countries: the DRC, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and SA.
By Thursday SA had confirmed close to 1.5 million cases of Covid-19 and 48,478 deaths — out of 3.8m cases and 99,840 deaths reported in Africa.
A new study in the British Medical Journal this week showed that the impact of Covid-19 in Africa had been “vastly underestimated” and the death rate of 15% to 20% of the sampled deaths was higher than the official reports suggested.
Nkengasong said Africa would not get out of the pandemic’s grip unless countries reached a vaccination target of 60% to 70% of their populations.
As new cases fell on average by 21% over the past month, he said: “We are excited we will be able to start vaccinating health care workers and to learn from the process.
“We are hoping that before next Friday the delivery of vaccines will start going out to members states. That will be the first attempt to reach out to about 20 countries,” he said at the weekly briefing.
You go to war with what you have and not what you need.
“Overall, 26 countries have submitted their applications to AVATT (African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team) resulting in an overall number of doses ordered (of) 180 million,” he said.
Some countries may have wanted to start securing vaccines through Covax before they approached AVATT, in his view.
On the AVATT platform currently, countries can order the Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.
The million doses arriving soon are part of an MTN donation, amounting to seven million Covid-19 doses, in partnership with the Africa CDC.
These will be the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, which has proven to be safe and efficacious against the original virus.
The vaccine failed, however, to prevent mild and moderate disease caused by the dominant variant (known as 501Y.V2) in SA, according to a study based on an interim analysis of data.
For this reason, SA has paused its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine and will be selling its initial million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to AVATT.
Nkengasong said: “AVATT is negotiating with SA to obtain the vaccines. They will be purchased and are not free of charge. They are not a donation and will add to the stock we already have on the platform.
“SA is not dumping this vaccine on the rest of the continent. It is the same vaccine from the Serum Institute of India,” said Nkengasong.
“SA has been transparent, first in telling the world about the new variant and, second, in sharing any studies that this variant might be behaving differently with respect to the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
“The AstraZeneca vaccine is a very efficacious vaccine in the right context,” said Nkengasong, urging countries — where the variant is not the dominant strain circulating, as in SA — to forge ahead with AstraZeneca vaccinations.
“This is a good vaccine, it is a safe vaccine and, again, we are not forcing countries to decide.”
The AstraZeneca vaccine is a very efficacious vaccine in the right context.
He said: “We find ourselves in a situation where we have to fight this pandemic aggressively and the AstraZeneca vaccine is available almost immediately for us.”
“You go to war with what you have and not what you need. In the coming months, the landscape of vaccine options will improve.”
Asked about Africans who travel overseas to get Covid-19 vaccinations, Nkengasong replied: “How would they get into the line, or cut the queue? I believe that countries have strict criteria about how the rollout of vaccines will work, with health careworkers, then populations with underlying disease and the elderly.”
The Africa CDC hopes to see large-scale Covid-19 vaccination taking place on the continent by the beginning of April, he said.
Covid-19 is not the only killer on the continent at present, with Ebola outbreaks in the DRC and Guinea also claiming lives in the past week: two out of four people with Ebola died in the DRC and six people died in Guinea, where there are now three confirmed cases and five probable infections.
Nkengasong said there were public health teams in the field because of Covid-19 and they could be redeployed swiftly to contain the Ebola outbreaks, with effective vaccines and treatment.
Meanwhile, across Africa people should keep wearing masks, washing hands and observing other safety measures against coronavirus, said Nkengasong, who seemed encouraged by the downward trend in new cases.
In the past month new cases reported, on average, by region have seen:
- 29% decrease in the Southern region
- 18% decrease in the Northern region
- 3% decrease in the Western region
- 1% decrease in the Eastern region
- 1% increase in the Central region
But Nkengasong said: “We all know that this is a very tricky virus. I have not known of a virus infecting more than 100 million people in my whole career. At any point it can come back, and we cannot be complacent at all while waiting for the vaccine to arrive.”
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