SA's vaccine rollout: Queue-jumpers warned as vaccinations climb

The milestone of 100,000 health-care workers vaccinated was reached on Friday and a new shipment of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Covid-19 vaccines is expected today.

"The teams are magnificent. They are working very hard and we hit the 100,000 mark," said professor Glenda Gray, co-principal investigator of the project through which they are being vaccinated.

Gray warned that anyone committing fraud to jump the vaccination queue could face criminal charges.

"We know people are desperate and anxious. We hear about fraud but we need names to investigate. We take any fraudulent activity very seriously and would open up a criminal case," she said.

As a result of these allegations, health workers now have to show credentials at the vaccination sites, said professor Linda-Gail Bekker of the University of Cape Town, who is co-principal investigator with Gray on the J&J project.

She urged people to think about the health workers on the frontline who have been showing up "day after day for 365 days".

"If you usurp their position [in the queue], you are removing the vaccine from the arm of somebody where it is needed most," Bekker said. "If your mother gets Covid, health-care workers will be looking after her."

Given the range of health workers - from dentists to psychiatrists, all of whom see patients at some point - prioritising who gets the jab is challenging.

"If you can't vaccinate them all who do you put at the front? That is hard. That is what is keeping us up at night," Bekker said.

There had been a dip in the speed of vaccinations as a new batch was being distributed and more vaccination sites were set up in new localities, she said.

"Some of them wanted to do dry runs and that slowed us down a bit, but they have since started or will on Monday [tomorrow]," Bekker said.

She said they wanted places like George and Paarl to "mop up the dorpies with clinics" around them, which would require some health-care workers to drive some distance.

"The Northern Cape is trying to move ahead and we are having a conversation about whether to use mobile sites there." Bekker said they wanted to expand the rollout to rural areas to be equitable and fair.

She said research pharmacists had been helping to train private pharmacists to be compliant with the terms of the rollout, on top of their normal tasks.

"We do not have enough hands," she said. "Kudos to the team."

Gray said that despite the pressures, vaccination teams were encouraged by the huge demand for shots, 70% of which are being administered to health-care workers in the public sector and 30% to their private sector colleagues.

"Nobody has ever done this before so there are huge challenges. This is not just a rollout but a rollout under study conditions and we are learning every day," said Gray, who is president of the South African Medical Research Council.

She expected to step back about 10 days after the launch of vaccinations, but nearly three weeks on she is still locked into the daily demands of the rollout.

"On the whole it is going very well. A lot of people are upbeat and happy about being vaccinated and how it is going, but you can't please everybody," she said, noting that some people were frustrated by the queues.

"We are on a sharp learning curve and have to be very agile. Every tweak we make - for example, to the electronic vaccination data system - has ramifications."

SA is expecting 1.1-million Covid-19 vaccines before the end of the month and between 8-million and 10-million more from April to June, health minister Zweli Mkhize said on Thursday.