South Africa on Monday received the first batch of 325,260 doses of Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine, which will be distributed after a quality control test, South African authorities said.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that the first batch of Pfizer’s vaccine, with 325,260 doses, arrived at the Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, of which a sample will be tested for quality control before being distributed across the country.
Thirty million doses by the end of the year
South Africa is expecting more vaccines from Pfizer in the coming weeks, with nearly 4.5 million doses of the vaccine expected to be delivered to the country by the end of June, and 30 million doses by the end of the year.
Additionally, South Africa is also expecting delivery of 31 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine to carry out its mass vaccination campaign, which aims to inoculate 40 million of its nearly 60 million people by February 2022.
So far, South Africa, which has the highest number of covid-19 cases and deaths in Africa, has vaccinated just over 317,000 of its 1.2 million healthcare workers.
That African country has a cumulative total of more than 1.58 million confirmed cases, including more than 54,000 deaths, according to South Africa’s African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.
