Cape Town – A huge chunk of South Africa’s budget for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout programme will be spent on needles, syringes and paying staff.
This was said by Health Minister Zweli Mkhize during an interview on SABC’s Morning Live on Monday morning.
“The bigger cost in this programme isn't going to come from the cost of transportation, it's going to come from the cost of administration.The use of swabs, the needles, the syringe, the persons who will be doing the administering, that's going to be an additional price that we going to have to bring in.
“At the moment we estimated that just the cost of syringes, swabs, and administering could come close to R60. So that figure depends on whether you get a private administrator or you would want it to be administered by the government department,” he said.
Mkhize said government was currently finalising the cost of transport and logistics.
“The requirements are not the same if you got the AstraZeneca, the requirements are not as onerous as if you were to get the Pfizer vaccine that is being worked on, depending on which one will be arriving.”
The minister gave the assurance 1 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines would arrive on our shores this week.
In anticipation of the world needing syringes and vaccines to successfully carry out Covid-19 vaccine rollout programmes, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) announced it has stockpiled over half a billion syringes.
Unicef is also buying 5 million safety boxes to dispose of used syringes and needles, thus preventing the risk of needle stick injuries and blood borne diseases.