By Antony Sguazzin
(Bloomberg) – South Africa vaccinated 39,371 people over two days as its broad rollout of Covid-19 vaccines began, the National Department of Health said.
The slow-pace of the vaccination programme, which is initially using the two-dose Pfizer vaccine, highlights the challenges the country is facing in reaching its aim of the inoculating the 40 million it needs to reach so-called herd immunity. The government has said the programme will pick up pace.
While almost 480,000 South African health workers have been inoculated as part of trial with single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines the government has come under criticism for delays to the broad rollout.
Initially a failure to pre-order vaccines slowed the programme, which was then set back by a study that showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine was less effective against a coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa.
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