The South Sudan ministry of health has said the return of Covid-19 vaccines to the COVAX facility, the global initiative for equitable access of vaccines, should not cause concern as it is based on the country's absorption capacity.
The undersecretary of the health ministry, Mayen Machut Achiek, explained in an interview with Radio Tamazuj on Wednesday that the move was compelled by the realization that the country cannot administer the vaccines before their expiry date.
“With the African countries that are having financial problems with storing the vaccine, what the COVAX facility has done is they will take from you the quantity that you are unlikely to deploy before the expiring date,” Machut explained. “So instead of (the vaccine) expiring in your cold chain, they will take it and put it on the platform. Now when it is still on the platform, a country will pop up and say it will be able to deploy it in three weeks, and therefore, all of us win.”
The undersecretary added, “For example, in our case, they are going to take 72,000 doses. The moment we finish with the current doses we have, we will go back to the COVAX platform and we will get back the amount we have committed."
On the vaccines reaching out to states and far-flung areas, Machut said preparations have been made and sensitization of communities is ongoing momentarily.
He said the uptake of the vaccine has now gone up in the last two weeks following social mobilization, awareness, and realizing the debilitating effects of the virus globally and most recently in India.
“It was slow and then people now gained confidence. We are observing that in the last two weeks we had a surge. And now even citizens at the state level, because of social mobilization and what they have seen, now that the uptake is going to be ambitious and we are happy with that,” Machut explained.
Asked about the Covid-19 variants in the country, Machut said: “We had various sequencing of the past weeks and we don’t have that record because our infectivity also has gone down remarkably. Sequencing we always do in the lab in Kampala. So we are also looking at the current positive places and we are trying to send some samples for sequencing.”
Kenyan authorities on Tuesday announced that they are set to receive a consignment of 72,000 AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine doses that South Sudan returned to the COVAX facility.
South Sudan received 132,000 doses of the vaccine in late March from COVAX, but so far has administered less than 8,000 jabs.
To date, South Sudan has recorded about 10,686 cases of Covid-19 and 115 deaths.