Covid-19: South Africa gives green light to China’s Sinovac vaccine
- The country is battling a third wave of the disease that has pushed the death toll past 60,000 and overwhelmed hospitals
- The South African government has been struggling to secure enough doses, and just over 5 per cent of the population has been vaccinated
Just over 5 per cent of South Africans have been vaccinated – or 3.3 million people out of a population of just under 60 million. It has recorded 2 million cases so far, although low testing rates in rural areas mean the real figure is probably higher, health experts say.
Early signs that Sinovac’s Covid-19 jab is safe and effective in children
South Africa’s low vaccination rate is due to a combination factors including bad luck – the government had to destroy 2 million contaminated Johnson & Johnson vaccines – slow bureaucracy, and richer countries immunising their own citizens first while the developing world waits for its doses.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has appealed to Western drug companies and their allied governments to temporarily waive vaccine patents so other countries can manufacture them – without success.
Opposition parties have heaped pressure on Ramaphosa to come up with another solution to the vaccine shortage.
The Marxist opposition Economic Freedom Fighters last month defied Covid-19 regulations to organise a march in the capital Pretoria, calling for the government to seek vaccines from Russia and China, not just the West.
The EFF on Saturday said the approval of the Sinovac vaccine was “long overdue”.
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China, where the coronavirus first surfaced in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, has supplied more than 480 million vaccine doses to other nations.
A statement from the Chinese embassy in South Africa said 2.5 million vaccines had been approved for delivery.
