Johannesburg:
South Africa, which is struggling to roll out its inoculation programme as it enters a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, stated Sunday it will pull two million of doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine following contamination issues at one of the US drugmaker’s internet sites.
On Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration told J&J that millions of doses made at the group’s Emergent BioSolutions facility in the city of Baltimore had been not appropriate for use.
Following a overview of the FDA choice, the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) stated in a statement that it had decided “not to release vaccine produced using the drug substance batches that were not suitable”.
J&J’s Emergent plant was ordered to pause production in April quite a few weeks soon after it was determined that batches of a substance used to make the vaccine had been cross-contaminated with components from an additional jab made by Anglo-Swedish pharma giant AstraZeneca.
J&J did not reveal the precise quantity of doses in every single batch, but they are identified to correspond to quite a few million jabs.
The FDA is nonetheless deciding regardless of whether to permit the factory to reopen.
Acknowledging the setback in South Africa’s vaccination programme, Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane stated Saturday that the nation had two batches — representing some two million doses — that had been stored in a higher-safety laboratory in Port Elizabeth belonging to drugmaker Aspen.
South Africa is one of the nations campaigning for a waiver of patents on Covid-19 vaccines in order to permit each and every nation to make generic versions at low price.
“If we are to save lives and end the pandemic, we need to expand and diversify manufacturing and get medical products to treat, combat and prevent the pandemic to as many people as quickly as possible,” President Cyril Ramaphosa told the G7 group of wealthy nations meeting in Britain on Sunday.
South Africa is counting on a delivery of 31 million doses of the single-shot J&J vaccine to support inoculate its population of 59 million.
– One % vaccinated –
It has also secured 30 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that jab will have to be stored at very low temperatures and needs two shots.
SAHPRA stated that a new delivery of about 300,000 doses of the J&J jab “that have been cleared by the US FDA that meet the requirements and will subsequently be released and shipped to South Africa.”
The government currently temporarily suspended vaccinations in April soon after uncommon instances of blood clots had been reported in the US.
And in February, South Africa turned down more than 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine mainly because of doubts about its efficacy on the regional coronavirus variant.
Lagging behind lots of other nations, South Africa has only vaccinated just more than one % of its population. It is the African nation hardest hit by the pandemic, with more than 1.7 million infections and almost 58,000 deaths.
More than 9,300 new instances had been registered in the previous 24 hours.
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