University of Queensland scientists used a ‘patch’ to deliver a US-developed COVID vaccine without the jab, and successfully protected mice from the virus.
The vaccine candidate from University of Texas Hexapro was delivered via the high-density microarray patch (HD-MAP) and provided protection against COVID disease with a single, painless ‘click’ from a handheld applicator.
Dr David Muller, from UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, said the vaccine patch produced strong immune responses that were shown to be effective when the mice were exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
“When the Hexapro vaccine is delivered via HD-MAP applicator – rather than a needle – it produces better and faster immune responses,” Dr Muller said.
“It also neutralises multiple variants, including the UK and South Africa variants.
“And it’s much more user-friendly than a needle – you simply ‘click’ an applicator on the skin, and 5000 microscopic projections almost-imperceptibly deliver vaccine into the skin.
“The UQ team, together with Vaxxas, hope to take the technology to the world and are looking for funding opportunities to accelerate to clinical trials as soon as possible.” Dr Muller said that Hexapro, delivered by the high-density microarray patch, could dramatically assist global vaccine rollout effort, particularly for billions of vulnerable people in low- and middle-income countries.
“We’ve shown this vaccine, when dry-coated on a patch, is stable for at least 30 days at 25 degrees Celsius and one week at 40 degrees, so it doesn’t have the cold chain requirements of some of the current options.”
High-density microarray patch (HD-MAP)
Vaxxas was founded in 2011 with the help of University of Queensland. The company’s president and CEO, David L Hoey, said he was extremely excited about the findings.
“These results are extremely clear – vaccination by HD-MAP produces much stronger and more protective immune responses against COVID-19 in model systems than via needle or syringe,” he said.
“We thank and recognise our incredible research collaborators at UQ for these important findings.
“The prospect of having a single-dose vaccine, that could be easily distributed and self-administered, would greatly improve global pandemic vaccination capabilities,” said Hoey
The research is currently undergoing peer review and has been published in BioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2021.05.30.446357).
An investigation by The BMJ uncovered undisclosed financial links between certain authors and the tobacco and e-cigarette industry in a number of COVID research papers, which had suggested that smokers were less likely to develop COVID.
In April 2020, two French studies (in preprint and not yet peer reviewed) suggested that nicotine might have a protective effect against COVID, which was coined the ‘nicotine hypothesis’.
The studies were reported on widely by the media, causing fears that it could undermine decades of tobacco control. What should have been an opportunity for promoting cessation of this practice which every year kills five million people around the world.
Since then, the ‘nicotine hypothesis’ has been soundly disproved, with several studies showing that, to the contrary, smoking is associated with an increased chance of COVID related death.
Journalists Stéphane Horel and Ties Keyze investigated the circumstances of these reports. They pointed out that one of the study authors, Professor Jean-Pierre Changeux, has a history of receiving funding from the Council for Tobacco Research, whose purpose was to fund research that would cast doubt on the dangers of smoking and focus on the positive effects of nicotine.
From 1995 to 1998, documents from the tobacco industry show that Changeux’s laboratory received $220,000 (£155,000; €180,000) from the Council for Tobacco Research.
When approached by The BMJ, Changeux assured them that he has not received any funding linked “directly or indirectly with the tobacco industry” since the 1990s.
In late April 2020, Greek researcher Konstantinos Farsalinos was the first to publish the ‘nicotine hypothesis’ formally in a journal, in an editorial in Toxicology Reports.
That journal’s editor in chief, Aristidis Tsatsakis was a co-author, as was A Wallace Hayes, who in 2013 had been a member of Philip Morris International’s scientific advisory board, and had served as a paid consultant to the tobacco company.
Another co-author is Konstantinos Poulas, head of the Molecular Biology and Immunology Laboratory at the University of Patras, where Farsalinos is affiliated.
The laboratory has been receiving funding from Nobacco, the market leader in Greek e-cigarettes and the exclusive distributor of British American Tobacco’s nicotine delivery systems since 2018. However, in their published scientific articles, neither Farsalinos nor Poulas had ever declared this Nobacco funding.
Yet the journalists showed that two grants were attributed in 2018 by the Foundation for a Smoke Free World—a non-profit established by tobacco company Philip Morris International in 2017—to ‘Patras Science Park’.
The grants, which according to tax documents came close to €83 000, went to NOSMOKE, a university start-up incubator headed by Poulas, which markets an ‘organic’ vaping product.
Last month, the European Respiratory Journal retracted a paper with Poulas and Farsalinos as co-authors, after two other authors failed to disclose conflicts of interest.
The retracted article had found that “current smoking was not associated with adverse outcome” in patients admitted to hospital with COVID, and it claimed that smokers had a significantly lower risk of acquiring the virus.
The foundation has invested heavily in the COVID/nicotine hypothesis, said Horel and Keyzer.
In June 2020 it set aside €900 000 for research “to better understand the associations between smoking and/or nicotine use, and COVID-19 infection and outcome.”
Its request stated that the pandemic offered “both an opportunity and a challenge for individuals to quit smoking or transition to reduced risk nicotine products.”
They concluded that, in 2021, “amid a global lung disease pandemic, tobacco industry figures are increasingly pushing the narrative of nicotine as the solution to an addiction that they themselves created, with the aim of persuading policy makers to give them ample room to market their “smoke-free” products. This makes studies on the hypothetical virtues of nicotine most welcome indeed.”
Article information: Covid 19: How harm reduction advocates and the tobacco industry capitalised on the pandemic to promote nicotine, The BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.n1303 , www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1303
Viral load analysis of wastewater suggests that KwaZulu-Natal may already have entered the third wave of COVID infections, according to research by DUT.
The Institute for Water and Wastewater Technology, based at DUT, has been monitoring viral loads of wastewater at the central treatment plant in eThekwini since July 2020, and found a clear correlation between clinical cases and viral loads detected in wastewater.
While clinical cases were reported to be on the increase in KZN since April 20 this year, they had found an increase in wastewater viral load some three weeks earlier.
The Institute for Water and Wastewater noted that the peak of the COVID second wave in South Africa occurred in January with an average of 40 000 cases in KwaZulu-Natal.
Over this period, the researchers measured average viral loads of 4.72 log copies per 100 millilitres at the central wastewater treatment plant. However, over the last four weeks, viral loads have averaged 5.57 log copies per 100 millilitres.
This has led the institute to suggest that there are far more cases than have been reported clinically, with a significant presence of asymptomatic individuals.
A report [PDF] on the third wave by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases indicated that there was a seroprevalence for SARS-CoV-2, a proxy for previous infection, of 30% to 40% after the third wave. This indicates that COVID infections were already widespread, and lends credence to the institute’s notion of extremely widespread asymptomatic cases. Projections for KZN showed a much lower peak for hospital admissions.
To avoid stigmatisation and simplify discussion, the World Health Organization has announced a new naming system for variants of the COVID virus with important mutations.
In an attempt to remove the country-associated stigma from the emergence of a variant, each will receive a name from the Greek alphabet.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s coronavirus lead, said that “no country should be stigmatised for detecting and reporting variants”.
She added that these new labels for VOI/VOC are “simple, easy to say and remember and are based on the Greek alphabet, a system that was chosen following wide consultation and a review of several potential systems”.
In the new naming system, B.1.17., the variant first reported in Kent, England is designated Alpha, B.1351, the variant originating in South Africa is called Beta, the Brazilian variant P.1 is now Gamma and the B.1617.2 variant first reported in India is Delta. The variants of interest run from Epsilon to Kappa. The WHO has provided a table detailing the different names.
These Greek letters will not replace existing scientific names, though there are only 24 letters. If more variants are identified for naming, a new naming scheme will be announced, Ms Van Kerkhove told US-based website STAT News.
“We’re not saying replace B.1.1.7, but really just to try to help some of the dialogue with the average person,” she told the US-based website. “So that in public discourse, we could discuss some of these variants in more easy-to-use language.”
On Monday, a scientific adviser for the UK government said the country was now in the early stages of a third wave of coronavirus infections, in part driven by the Delta variant, which had emerged in India.
It is thought to spread more quickly than the UK’s Alpha variant, which was responsible for the surge in cases in the UK over the winter.
Vietnam has reported what appears to be a combination of those two variants. On Saturday, the country’s health minister stated that it could spread quickly through the air and described it as “very dangerous”.
The B1617 variant, is becoming increasingly dominant around the world and could worsen the pandemic – especially in countries where low vaccination rates are low. This warning comes from experts in Singapore, who added that there will be more virus mutations to come.
Professor Teo Yik Ying, dean of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, said to The Straits Times: “What is frightening is the speed at which this variant is able to spread and circulate widely within the community, often surpassing the capability of contact-tracing units to track and isolate exposed contacts to break the transmission chains.
“It has the potential to unleash a bigger pandemic storm than the world has previously seen.”
Delta has mutated to be more transmissible, and may slightly weaken the protection conferred by vaccines as well as natural infection, experts said. The variant, which was first detected in India in October 2020, is now found around the world.
WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said that B1617 is 1.5 times to two times more transmissible than the strain that first appeared in Wuhan 18 months ago.
It is now present in more than 50 countries and is surpassing other strains causing infections in India, such as B117 (now ‘Alpha’, commonly known as the UK variant).
“On clinical severity, it’s a little less clear because there have not been controlled studies which look at patients that you control for multiple factors, and then look at the impact of the strain on the clinical profile,” Dr Soumya said at a recent webinar.
Dr Soumya added that anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that more young people in India had been infected and developed serious illness.
In India, more than 27 million people have been infected with COVID, with over 325 000 deaths.
There are three versions of B1617 – B16171 (Kappa), B16172 (Delta) and B16173. The second version is the most relevant as it has appeared to overtake B1671/Kappa as reported globally. The third version, B16173, is rare and has not yet been given a Greek letter designation by the WHO.
On May 8, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases announced that it had detected five cases of the Delta variant in South Africa; three in Gauteng and two in KwaZulu–Natal. Presently, it is unclear if B1617 causes more severe illness or a higher mortality rate.
The best weapon remains widespread vaccination, Prof Teo said. Vaccinated individuals have less chance of being infected, and are much less likely to develop severe symptoms even if infected, Prof Teo added.
Preliminary US research showed that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines should still be effective against B1617.
A study by Public Health England also showed that the vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca work against Delta, which has become the dominant strain in the UK.
The study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech shot was 88% effective against the Delta variant two weeks after the second dose, with a 60% effectiveness for the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The pressure is to keep up with the rapidly mutating virus and immunise populations to control it. Unfortunately, most countries’s vaccination programmes are far behind.
On Friday, WHO European director Hans Kluge warned that the pandemic will not be over until at least 70% of people are vaccinated. He deplored the roll-out in Europe, saying that while it was better it was still “too slow”.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said about 43% of adults in the European Union and European Economic Area have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine as of Saturday, 29 May.
“Time is against us,” Dr Kluge warned, stressing the need to accelerate the immunisation campaign.
South Africa’s long-delayed vaccination programme is in full swing, but so far only about 1% of the population have received a jab, which is currently being administered to healthcare workers and those over 60.
Globally, the outlook does not seem good. The New York Times reported that more than 1.81 billion vaccine doses had been administered worldwide as at Friday (May 28), but a stark divide remains between countries’ vaccination programmes, with some not even reporting a single dose given.
Global inequity in vaccine supplies and distribution persists, and the opportunity for widespread vaccination remains a privilege for advanced economies, Prof Teo said.
Professor Dale Fisher, chair of the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, said this means a higher chance of B1617 creeping into countries that had been virtually untouched by COVID.
“These countries, such as Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, are more vulnerable due to the low vaccination rates, leaving them more susceptible to severe disease,” Prof Fisher added.
He urged wealthier nations to lend more support to the WHO-backed Covax programme, a global project to secure and distribute vaccines to poorer countries.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Sunday that he did not know “how long or how severe the third wave will be” as he tightened restrictions in response to rising COVID infections.
In a national address on Sunday, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that Level 2 COVID restrictions would in place from Monday in response to rising cases, saying that he did not know “how long or how severe the third wave will be”.
The new restrictions mostly target social gatherings as well as moving the night-time curfew forward by one hour to 11pm.
No more than 100 people can attend indoor events, while the number for outside was halved to 250. However, to the relief of the liquor industry and many South Africans, no alcohol restrictions have been put in place. This demonstrates a less economically restrictive approach than the initial lockdowns, which caused the economy to shrink by 7% last year.
COVID hospitalisations increased 17% in recent days and the Free State, the Northern Cape, the North West and Gauteng are already seeing a third wave, Ramaphosa said.
A third wave is considered to be underway when the seven-day moving average of new cases exceeds 30% of the previous wave’s peak, according to the definition used by the SA Covid-19 Modelling Consortium.
“It is only a matter of time before the whole country enters a third wave … gatherings are the biggest source of transmission and we urge South Africans to social distance,” Ramaphosa said.
The daily infection rate is sharply higher than the averages of between 1000 and 1500 for most of the year.
President Ramaphosa said cases averaged about 3700 in the past week, a 31% increase compared to the previous seven days, which he partly attributed to people’s increasing complacency over following health protocols.
“Because rates of infection have been low for some time, and because we are all suffering from pandemic fatigue, we have tended to become complacent.
“We have not been as vigilant about wearing our masks all the time, we have not been avoiding crowded places, and we have been socialising more,” the president said.
Due to the delay in infections and subsequent COVID testing, it may take several days for the new restrictions to have any noticeable impact on the daily number of new cases reported. The case positivity rate is now 11.9%, according to the most recent statistics for SA, now well above the 10% level which is considered acceptable.
French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in South Africa today for talks with President Cyril Ramaphosa on a range of issues including possible technological assistance to aid South Africa’s response to the COVID pandemic.
On the agenda of the visit is the economic, health, research and manufacturing responses to the COVID pandemic.
Arriving from Rwanda, where he acknowledged France’s role in the 1994 genocide, Macron held talks in Pretoria with President Ramaphosa, whom he met last week in Paris at a summit on African economies.
The pair were also due to attend an event to support vaccine production on the continent, sponsored by the European Union, the United States and the World Bank.
So far South Africa is the country worst hit by COVID on the continent as far available monitoring can determine, and has vaccinated just 1 percent of its population of 59 million people.
South Africa’s immunisation efforts have been hampered by delayed procurement, and then selling off its AstraZeneca vaccines obtained via Covax to other African countries after trial results showed drastically reduced effectiveness against the local B.1.351 variant. Rollout of the replacement Johnson & Johnson vaccine was paused for two weeks in April due to blood clot fears.
Now, along with India, South Africa is campaigning for a waiver of intellectual property rights on COVID vaccines, so that each country may produce its own doses. This effort has met with stiff resistance so far.
Macron has voiced support for a technology transfer to enable vaccine production sites to be set up in poorer countries.
Visit long delayed
Macron’s visit to South Africa has been long delayed due to the COVID pandemic. The initial purpose for the trip had been to discuss multilateral cooperation with South Africa, an important G20 partner which is also a regular guest at G7 summits.
According to Foreign Policy, the French leader will also seek to establish greater influence in a region that is experiencing greater instability, marked by recent insurgencies in Mozambique.
Jihadist attacks forced French energy giant Total to suspend work on a multi-billion euro gas project in Cabo Delgado province after a nearby town was targeted.
Before he returns to France, he will pay a visit to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, whose main missions are the fight against AIDS and education in rural areas.
US President Joe Biden has ordered intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts in investigating the origins of COVID, as well as the theory that it was a ‘lab leak’ in China.
This comes days after details of a US intelligence report emerged in the Wall Street Journal, claiming that three doctors working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 – about when epidemiologists believe SARS-CoV-2 first began circulating in humans.
Mr Biden said the US intelligence community was divided on whether it was the result of a lab accident, or from jumping from human to animal. Mr Biden asked the groups to report back to him within 90 days.
China’s embassy in the US made a warning statement posted on its website, without mentioning the president’s remarks. “Smear campaigns and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of ‘lab leak’ is resurfacing. “To politicise origin tracing, a matter of science, will not only make it hard to find the origin of the virus, but give free rein to the ‘political virus’ and seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic,” it said.
Authorities linked early COVID cases to a seafood market in Wuhan, leading scientists to theorise the virus first passed to humans from animals.
Why now?
In a White House statement released on Wednesday, President Biden said he had asked for a report on the origins of COVID after taking office, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident”. He asked for “additional follow-up” on receiving the report.
Mr Biden said most of the intelligence community had “coalesced” around those two scenarios, but “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other”.
The president has now asked agencies to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion”, and report to him within 90 days.
He concluded by saying the US would “keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence”.
Beijing meanwhile has previously suggested a possible US lab origin for COVID. The Chinese embassy said it supported a full investigation into “some secretive bases and biological laboratories all over the world”.
Mr Biden’s statement coincided with a CNN report that the president’s administration earlier this year shut down a state department investigation into a possible lab leak origin.
The ‘lab leak’ theory
When they first arose last year, the laboratory leak allegations were widely dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory, with many US media outlets describing the claims as debunked or false after then-President Donald Trump said COVID had originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Two months ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a joint report with Chinese scientists on COVIDs origins, rating the likelihood of an accidental lab release as “extremely unlikely”. However the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that he was not satisfied that the investigation had looked at this possibility enough to rate. The investigation only stirred up more interest in the ‘lab leak’ theory, with 18 scientists signing an open letter calling for more investigation before it could be ruled out.
There is little evidence for the ‘lab leak’ theory in the public domain however, and intelligence reports such as the one the Wall Street Journal based its story on are often of unproven provenance.
Chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci still believes that COVID jumped from animals to humans, though this month he admitted he was no longer confident COVID had developed naturally. Mounting pressure
Mr Biden’s statement comes the day after Xavier Becerra, US secretary for health and human services, urged the WHO to ensure a “transparent” investigation into the virus’s origins.
“Phase 2 of the Covid origins study must be launched with terms of reference that are transparent, science-based and give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak,” Mr Becerra said.
On Tuesday, Mr Trump sought to take credit in an emailed statement to the New York Post, saying: “To me it was obvious from the beginning but I was badly criticised, as usual. Now they are all saying: ‘He was right.'”
Quickly and efficiently screening incoming travellers for COVID is currently beyond present technology, but dogs — with their keen sense of smell that has aided humans for thousands of years — may be a solution.
An Ekurhuleni-based company is in the final stages of training dogs to be deployed as COVID sniffers at South African points of entry, just in time for the expected third wave, eNCA reports.
Currently, the most widespread test is the rapid antigen (lateral flow) test, which has been shown to produce more false positives for COVID than real detections in low prevalence situations — such as travellers arriving in a country.
Alternatively, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test has the greatest sensitivity but is time-consuming and expensive. And most currently available tests involve nasopharyngeal swabs — an unpleasant experience for most people.
Dogs, with their keen sense of smell have long been used to sniff out drugs and explosives. In recent years they have also been trained to sniff out certain cancers and malaria, although they are not regularly used for this. Using medical sniffer dogs has the advantage of being extremely quick and could be used in resource-constrained settings.
In the first months of the pandemic, many wondered whether dogs could in fact smell the disease, and began training dogs to see if it was possible. Past studies had already established that the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released in body odour change during respiratory infections. VOCs associated with COVID infection showed a clear distinction between infected and uninfected individuals, suggestive of a strong, distinctive smell.
Initial trials with trained sniffer dogs at airports in France, Lebanon and FInland found that the dogs were even capable of detecting infection before it could be picked up with clinical tests.
A recent study led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimated that a plane with 300 passengers could be screened in 30 minutes with two sniffer dogs, and only those passengers identified by the dogs would be required to take a PCR test.
The study, which is not yet peer-reviewed and which is currently available as a pre-print, found that dogs could be trained to detect COVID in 94.3% (test sensitivity) — comparable to the gold standard of PCR tests with 97.2% sensitivity. They also have a specificity of 92%, meaning that they have a low rate of false positives.
Dr Claire Guest, Chief Scientific Officer at Medical Detection Dogs, which assisted in the study, said: “These fantastic results are further evidence that dogs are one of the most reliable biosensors for detecting the odour of human disease. Our robust study shows the huge potential for dogs to help in the fight against COVID.
“Knowing that we can harness the amazing power of a dog’s nose to detect COVID quickly and non-invasively gives us hope for a return to a more normal way of life through safer travel and access to public places, so that we can again socialise with family and friends.”
Besides simple detection, the dogs could also serve as a visible deterrent to people wanting to travel with fake COVID passports, the authors said. The findings of their study also provided valuable knowledge which could be applied to future pandemics. The authors acknowledged the limitation that the dogs were conducting the tests in a controlled environment as opposed to the real world.
Nearly six months after South Africa’s first procurement deal was made with the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) programme, but vaccine flops and shortages in supply have left South Africa empty-handed, while Covax struggles to even meet its June delivery goal.
South Africa’s vaccine rollout has been anything but smooth. The first batch of vaccines, produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), arrived in the country on 1 February but were abandoned a week later after a study found it was ineffective against the 501Y.V2 variant. That first batch of one million doses were sold onto the African Union (AU) and the remainder of the order refunded.
The health department switched to the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) single-dose shot and vaccinated nearly half a million healthcare workers until its use was also halted over blood clot concerns. Phase 2 of the rollout is using the Pfizer vaccine. Fortunately, it has been found that it can be stored at much higher temperatures than its previous ultracold requirements, making it easier to distribute.
However, the failure to join Covax by December 2020 was an early warning sign over the government’s handling of vaccine acquisition. The Covax iniative, led by the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi) and World Health Organization (WHO) to supply vaccines to poorer nations, were expected to kickstart South Africa’s rollout.
Missing that first deadline, the health department and Solidarity Fund confirmed, on 22 December 2020, that a down payment of R283 million had been made to secure doses through Covax.
Vaccine flip-flopping At first, South Africa was to receive almost 2.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, but the country’s decision to abandon the use of AstraZeneca caused severe delays. The country’s allocated AstraZeneca doses were taken back into the Covax programme.
“South Africa was allocated 2 426 400 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine… it has requested to be allocated another vaccine in place of AZ, and will receive allocations of alternative vaccines instead,” Gavi spokesperson Evan O’Connell told Business Insider South Africa.
“It has already been allocated, at this stage, 1,392,300 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, allocated for Q2 2021.”
According to Covax’s first-round schedule, South Africa was due to receive 117 000 Pfizer doses before April. But Covax’s deliveries are falling behind, putting initiative’s ability to meet its second quarter target.
On 17 May UNICEF Executive Director, Henrietta Fore announced that the Covax facility would shortly have delivered 65 million doses, which should have been 170 million doses by that time.
“By the time G7 leaders gather in the UK next month, and as a deadly second wave of COVID will likely continue to sweep across India and many of its South Asian neighbours, the shortfall will near 190 million doses.”
Covax hamstrung by Indian COVID crisis
India’s COVID crisis has hamstrung Covax’s aim of delivering 237 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine in the first half of 2021. With India having the world’s highest infection numbers and deaths since April, the SII, which produces AstraZeneca doses for Covax, announced that it would halt foreign supply until December at the earliest.
“We continue to scale up manufacturing and prioritise India,” said SII CEO Adar Poonawalla on 18 May. “We also hope to start delivering to Covax and other countries by the end of the year.”
At only 35% of its targeted vaccine deliveries, Covax is calling for renewed funding and donations from developed nations — who are also accused of hoarding vaccines. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, criticised wealthy nations for continuing a “scandalous inequity” on Monday.
“We need countries to donate tens of millions of doses of vaccines immediately through Covax, which is the agreed global mechanism for distributing vaccines,” stated Ghebreyesus.
“We need companies to help make donations happen fast, and to give Covax the first right of refusal on all uncommitted doses now, in 2021.”
It’s unclear whether the SII’s decision to halt its supply will result in reallocations of the Pfizer doses, on which SA is depending, and which therefore could result in further delays for its Covax-allocated doses.
