The health minister announced that the country had instead secured 9 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. South Africa is expected to green-light the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and begin administering doses this week. It will start vaccinating health care workers with Johnson & Johnson shots in a research study. It was a damaging setback for efforts to curtail the pandemic in South Africa, the hardest-hit country on the continent. Earlier this month, COVAX announced a plan to distribute more than 337 million Covid-19 vaccine doses worldwide -- of which 336 million doses are the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine and just 1.2 million doses are the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Source: CNN February 16, 2021 22:18 UTC