Just under a third of South Africa’s remaining Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer are set to expire by July. After that, any unused doses will have to be destroyed. Until then the health department is trying to increase uptake of the doses and donate spare shots.
According to the health department, South Africa has received a total of 60,606,060 Covid vaccines — 39,272,220 Pfizer doses and 21,333,840 J&J doses .
“Central distributors” are specialised warehouses where Covid vaccines are sent first when they arrive in the country and are kept at temperatures at which they will last for the longest possible period. From there, the jabs are transported to either public sector provincial warehouses or private sector companies that do vaccinations.
Of the vaccines that have been distributed to provinces, 92% had made it into people’s arms by March 6. That means, of the 60.6 million doses that the country had received by then, about 53% had been used. “This level of wastage is in line with the internationally accepted rate of 5% or below,” says Crisp. “So the 467,135 vaccines that the 1.4% comes to might sound like a lot of jabs, but, it’s a low rate of wastage.”Wastage is the highest in Northern Cape , where cold-chain storage is a challenge and jabs have to be transported for long distances to sites. The second highest wastage is in Western Cape .
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