SA to get first million doses of Covid-19 vaccine this month: Zweli Mkhize

Health minister Zweli Mkhize on Thursday announced that the country will receive its first million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine this month.

Mkhize was addressing the portfolio committee on health on the country's Covid-19 vaccine programme.

He said his department had reached an agreement with the Serum Institute of India for the first batch of doses, for frontline workers.

“Today we announce that South Africa will be receiving the first 1 million doses of vaccine in January and another 500,000 in February from the Serum Institute of India,” said Mkhize.

“As recently as yesterday our teams from the department of health as well as the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority were fine-tuning and aligning all the regulations and processes to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays or impediments to activate this rollout.

“We are all happy that the Serum Institute of India and AstraZeneca Vaccine have already been approved by various regulators and is being rolled out in other countries.”

Mkhize assured South Africans that there will be no corruption in this procurement, unlike was the case with PPEs, as it was done directly by government with the manufacturer.

Said Mkhize: “This strengthens the credibility of all the processes as all the negotiations and payment issues are managed directly by government with the manufacturers. The concerns that we had with the PPEs is that there were many vendors that we had to procure from but this was direct between government and manufacturers.”

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Mkhize said the next step was for his department to engage all stakeholders to “ensure effective rollout  of the vaccines for our health workers”.