The long-awaited delivery has arrived.

South Africa received its first shipment of anti-Covid vaccines on Monday February 1, hours before President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the officially worst-affected country on the continent had "passed the peak" of the second wave of coronavirus. 

This arrival will allow the start of a mass vaccination campaign, which will primarily target health personnel. 

The authorities ultimately plan to vaccinate by the end of the year at least 67% of the population, or about 40 million people. 

"Great hope"

SABC public television showed President Ramaphosa at OR Tambo International Airport receiving, in pouring rain, one million doses of the British AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine, produced in India, fresh from the hold of a plane.

A delivery of 500,000 additional doses is expected during the month of February. 

Injections to about 1.2 million health workers will begin within about two weeks, after the vaccine has gone through a required quarantine and regulatory and quality control procedures. 

"The arrival of the vaccine provides great hope for the economic and social recovery of our country and, more importantly, for the health of our people," said President Ramaphosa. 

It "will give the signal for a mass vaccination campaign which will be the most ambitious and the largest in the history of our country," he added. 

The worst African record 

With at least 1.45 million recorded infections and more than 44,000 deaths, South Africa has the worst record in terms of numbers of cases and deaths on the continent. 

But the country has yet to start vaccinating its population, triggering criticism over the slow supply and the lack of a strategy. 

Cyril Ramaphosa tried to explain this delay: "The unprecedented global demand for vaccine doses, added to the much higher purchasing power of richer countries, has forced us to conduct long and in-depth negotiations with manufacturers, in order to get enough vaccines ". 

The epidemic in South Africa, the continent's most industrialized country, has been accelerated by a new variant, suspected of being more contagious. 

Despite this additional difficulty, the average number of daily contaminations has fallen over the past seven days to around 5,500, compared to 10,000 the previous week, "indicating that we have now passed the peak of the second wave," announced in the evening the president in a speech to the nation. 

Admissions to hospitals have also fallen, he said, justifying an easing now of restrictions in force, in particular on the sale of alcohol, the duration of the night curfew and religious gatherings. 

Acceleration  

South African Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize announced this weekend that he had reserved 20 million doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. 

They are in addition to the 12 million doses obtained from the Covax system set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) aimed at equitable distribution of vaccines, to the 9 million doses of that developed by the American laboratory Johnson & Johnson and the 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca / Oxford (including one million received on Monday). 

Africa was relatively untouched by the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, but the rise in the number of infections has recently accelerated.

As of Monday, the continent recorded 3.6 million cases and 91,000 deaths. 

Only a few African countries - Seychelles, Mauritius, Morocco and Algeria, in particular - have started to vaccinate the population 

At two doses per person, Africa will need 1.5 billion doses to immunize 60% of its roughly 1.3 billion people, at an estimated cost of between $ 7 billion and $ 10 billion. 

The African Union (AU) has obtained 670 million doses for its member states, the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC, an AU institution) said on Thursday. 

African countries are also to receive at least 600 million doses through the Covax system. 

With AFP

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