Cape Town - Health Minister Joe Phaahla says they want to ramp up the vaccination programme with more people to get the jabs in the next few weeks.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has said they want to increase the number of people vaccinated every day. The initial target was 200 000 people a day and this was increased to 300 000. In three days this week, more than 1 million people were vaccinated.
Phaahla said on Friday they want to get more people receiving the jabs. By Thursday, more than 8 million people had been vaccinated in the country, said Phaahla.
But they also will be receiving more doses of the vaccines in the next few months.
“Our vaccine supply has stabilised. We have over 10 million vaccines in our storage. In the month of August, we would have received over 20m doses.
’’By the end of the year, we hope to have delivered over 21 million doses of vaccines. We are very satisfied that we will not get any instability in terms of our vaccine supply,” said Phaahla.
He said the vaccines were safe after they were approved by the regulatory authority following internal processes.
Phaahla also said there were now fewer healthcare workers who have been falling sick due to Covid-19 after they started with the vaccination programme.
“Indeed, already as members of the public would know we started our vaccination programme with our healthcare workers. What we can see with this third wave, with the reports, very few healthcare workers have been falling sick, have ended up in hospital.’’
Political Bureau