Thread by @miamalan

[Thread] 1. South Africa's second batch of 80 000 J&J #CovidVaccines landed this morning (Saturday) at OR Tambo. The jabs have been taken to a secure facility in Gauteng from where it will be distributed to vaccine centres in provinces.

2. How many vaccine sites are there? For the 1st round of 80 000 there were 18 (3 in WC, 1 in Northern Cape and 2 in each of the other provinces). The sites will be expanded for the second batch. Here are the sites we had for the first round: tabsoft.co/2NIYV2y

3. Why are we getting small batches of 80 000 J&J jabs at a time instead of the 9 million we've ordered? Because J&J doesn't yet have @SAHPRA1 approval to distribute its jabs for wider roll-out. This morning's batch is part of up 500 000 jabs we're getting for research purposes.

4. Why is the @SAHPRA1 approval taking so long? Sahpra has to go through loads of data to ensure J&J's jabs are as safe and efficacious as the company says they are. It's the only way to ensure that we're importing quality medicine. Read more here. bit.ly/3r6oVU8

5. Has any other country approved J&J's jabs for roll-out? No, because it's so new. This #COVIDVaccine's efficacy results were only released a month ago, on 29 January, all the regulators are still studying the data: bit.ly/3sBFQOH

6. The US regulator, the FDA, however, issued a statement on Friday night endorsing the J&J #CovidVaccine after a review of the data. The FDA is likely to issue emergency use authorisation of the jab within the next few days: bit.ly/3sBFQOH

7. Why is SA conducting a study with the J&J jab if we already know it works? Because the type of approval required to use the jabs in a trial can be obtained quicker than the approval required for wider roll-out. Doing a trial means we can get some jabs into SA so long.

8. So what are we testing then and who can participate in the study? Only #HealthWorkers can take part because they're the most vulnerable to infection. We're not retesting if the J&J jab works; we're looking at the issues faced when the jab is rolled-out in "real life".

9. How many of the first batch of 80 000 jabs has SA used? By the end of Friday, we had used 63,648. The health department says we're vaccinating about 12 000 health workers a day now.