COVID-19 vaccines to land in South Africa on Monday

South Africa waits for the landing of one million COVID-19 vaccines on Monday. As AllAfrica reports, the medical cargo planned to arrive at OR Tambo on 1 February.

The first half of the arrived vaccines will be reserved for health workers, the SA ministerial advisory committee said. The one million Covishield drug doses South Africa is receiving are made under licence from AstraZeneca by the Serum Institute of India. Another 500,000 will arrive later this month.

Normally, Covishield vaccine requires two shots. The second one needs to be given between four and 12 weeks after the first one.

The efficacy of different anti-COVID vaccine varies

In fact, it’s hard to compare the efficacy of existing anti-corona vaccines. The point is some of the drugs like the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna jabs were tested before new, more infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, started to circulate the globe.

According to the recent researches, the AstraZeneca jab’s efficacy is lower than that of the Pfizer/BioNTech (95%) and Moderna (94.1%) vaccines, but higher than that of the Novavax (49.4% in South Africa) and Johnson & Johnson (57% in South Africa) drugs.