The Covid-19 vaccination campaign in South Africa took another blow. An investigation suspects that about 2 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine the country recently acquired were contaminated during the production process in Baltimore, Maryland.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the contaminated doses cannot therefore be used for the campaign. On Friday, June 11, U.S. authorities warned that several million doses of this vaccine distributed worldwide would have to be destroyed.

Tests had revealed that components of the Anglo-Swedish vaccine AstraZeneca, which was also manufactured in the same plant, had been mistakenly mixed with the J & J formula, causing them to become contaminated and unusable. A few weeks earlier, Washington had taken the decision to suspend production of the vaccine at the plant until the situation was back to normal.

If this incident represents a new setback for the J&J vaccine, it also marks a new stop in the vaccination campaign in South Africa, considered one of the most urgent on the continent, but which has already been delayed by several other incidents.

The country initially relied on the AstraZeneca vaccine but abandoned it after the product proved ineffective against the local variant of the pandemic. The authorities then decided to rely on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, whose single dose was supposed to speed up the vaccination campaign. But in April, the country finally suspended the deployment of the vaccine, following cases of thrombosis, before resuming its campaign a few days later.

It should be remembered that South Africa seeks to vaccinate 40 million people by the end of the year, or about 67% of the national population. However, it is estimated that only a little more than 1% of the population has been vaccinated to date, making it less and less likely that this goal will be reached.

As the number of cases continues to rise (1.7 million recorded to date, with 57,765 deaths and 1.6 million recoveries), the authorities hope to be able to produce the vaccines needed to continue their vaccination campaign. To this end, President Cyril Ramaphosa has been campaigning since 2020 for the lifting of intellectual property rights that prevent other countries from manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines.

“If the goal is indeed the one we agreed on, which is to vaccinate the world, then we must make the vaccines available,” he said at the G7 summit, which took place from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 June in the UK. "We cannot vaccinate the North and leave the South," he added, denouncing a "vaccine apartheid" that favors rich countries.

Moutiou Adjibi Nourou