For many countries, vaccine programmes have been one of the great triumphs of the pandemic. But in South Africa, it’s a very different story. To date, fewer than 5% of South Africans have been vaccinated, and the country is now in the grips of another COVID-19 surge as the delta variant takes hold. This puts a focus on the country’s vaccination failures of which there have been many, says Shabir A Madhi, professor of vaccinology at the University of Witwatersrand.
South Africa didn’t start trying to buy vaccine doses until too late and has been towards the back of the vaccine queue, which has led to a shortage of supplies. It has also struggled to roll out the vaccines that it has. In mid-June, a third of its supplies still sat unused, a sign of poor logistical planning and that its electronic vaccination system had failed to reach all groups across the population. But perhaps South Africa’s greatest error was with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which it stopped rolling out on the…