The South African Medical Association (SAMA), which represents doctors, said that there must be a choice of Covid-19 booster shots after Johnson & Johnson won the right to run research on the half a million health workers who took the company’s shot in an initial study.
The Sisonke trial, which gave health workers a vaccine ahead of a general vaccine rollout, will be extended with health workers offered a second J & J vaccine, the government said last month.
SAMA said that it is concerned due to potential evidence that boosters in the form of a messenger ribonucleic acid vaccine (like Pfizer) is potentially more effective than a second dose of a more traditional vector-based shot (like J & J).
J&J’s dose uses a piece of a modified cold virus to stimulate an immune response, while mRNA vaccines use genetic material to instruct cells to defend themselves against the coronavirus.
“What is it that informs the decision to roll out the Sisonke phase 2 trial in isolation?” SAMA said in an open letter to South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla on Wednesday. “Will health care workers be given the right to choose which booster they choose to take?”
The booster shots trial rollout is set to begin today and the addition of a choice would delay it by six weeks, said Nicholas Crisp , deputy director-general of the SA health department. This would mean that health workers wouldn’t get more protection ahead of a possible fourth wave, he said, adding that a Pfizer booster trial may be carried out later.
Because offering Pfizer as an alternative would set the process back “we elected not to go that route,” he said. “I actually am disappointed in SAMA raising this.”
SAMA’s intervention has also created a rift with the South African Medical Research Association, which is working with J&J on the trial.
“What they are asking us to do is to experiment further on health workers. They are saying disregard the evidence and conduct a further experiment,” said Glenda Gray, president of the SAMRC and co-lead of the J&J study in South Africa.
“We have people who have never conducted a vaccine trial in their life telling the public that one vaccine is better than another and creating a vaccine apartheid.”
Sources: BusinessTech, Eminetra
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