Acting Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane has come to the defence of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority after it came under attack from the EFF.
This was after the EFF marched on the Sahpra offices last Friday, where it demanded that Sputnik and Sinovac be registered.
The party accused chairperson of Sahpra Professor Helen Rees of a conflict of interest and that she was behind the delay by Sahpra to register the vaccines from Russia and China.
But Kubayi-Ngubane yesterday denied the allegations and said she had looked at the matter.
She said it was not useful to personalise issues at Sahpra when decisions were not taken by individuals.
“We talk of gender-based violence in this country and we have people who attack women,” said Kubayi-Ngubane.
She said Sahpra was doing its work in the manner that it was supposed to do.
Deputy director-general in the department Anban Pillay told the health portfolio committee that the Delta variant continued to be a dominant virus in the country.
He said there had been an increase in hospital admissions in the past few weeks with only the Northern Cape and the Free State registering declining infections.
“If we want to prevent hospital admissions, we have to stop transmissions,” said Pillay.
He added that they needed to intervene to bring down the numbers.
He said the Delta variant was more dangerous than other variants, including Beta and Alpha.
The Delta variant has been reported in over 85 countries.
“We started detecting the Delta variant some time in June. Just in a short space of time the Delta variant has displaced the Beta variant in a number of areas,” said Pillay.
He said the delta variant began in India in October last year and has now spread to countries across the globe.
“It’s a fairly dominant variant and it seems to take over from other variants,” he said.
Kubayi-Ngubane said the department wanted to ramp up the roll-out of vaccines in the country.
She said despite their target of 300 000 vaccinations a day, they were still lagging behind. They would improve with more sites for vaccination to be opened.
She said it was their intention to get as many people as possible on the vaccine programme.
The department had planned to reach herd immunity of 67% of the population by the end of the year.
But opposition parties said this would be difficult given the slow pace of the programme.