South Africa, lagging behind in vaccination and which has just entered a third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, announced on Sunday May 13 to withdraw two million Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines, due to "
A nonconformity problem
" when manufactured in the United States.
Read also: South Africa: doubts about two million Johnson & Johnson vaccines
The South African Medicines Agency (Sahpra) said in a statement to have "
taken the decision not to distribute vaccines produced from batches of inappropriate drug components
". The American authorities announced Friday that "
several batches
", that is to say several million doses, manufactured in Baltimore in the United States and whose production had to be stopped several weeks ago, will have to be discarded. Tests had revealed that components of the British vaccine AstraZeneca, made at the same factory, had been mistakenly mixed into J & J's formula.
The South African Minister of Health, Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane, who recognized "
a step backwards in the vaccination program
", had specified on Saturday that the batches concerned are those currently stored in a high-tech laboratory in Port Elizabeth ( South). The South African laboratory Aspen imports the components of the J&J vaccine from this site and packages them on site.
South Africa is campaigning for a temporary suspension of patents on anti-Covid vaccines, to allow each country to produce generic versions at low cost. "
If we want to save lives and put an end to the pandemic, we must develop and diversify production,
" President Cyril Ramaphosa hammered on Saturday at the G7 summit in England. South Africa is counting on the delivery of 31 million doses of the single-dose J&J vaccine, to immunize its population of 59 million. The country has managed to obtain 30 million doses of Pfizer, but this two-shot vaccine needs to be stored at very low temperatures. A new shipment of 300,000 “
approved
”
J&J vaccines is
due to arrive on Tuesday, South African officials said.
The government had already temporarily suspended the vaccine in April, after cases of blood clots in the United States. In February, he had also waived 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca, after doubts about its effectiveness against the local variant Beta. Lagging behind the rest of the world, South Africa has vaccinated just over 1% of its population. The African country officially the most affected, South Africa has more than 1.7 million cases, including nearly 58,000 deaths. More than 9,300 new infections have been identified in the past 24 hours.