A Covid-19 vaccine trial in SA will assess the safety and impact of varying doses of Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer shots as boosters for those infected with HIV and the wider population.
Participants will be randomly allocated a full or half dose of vaccine made by either J&J or Pfizer and BioNTech.
Recruitment has started and will continue for about four months, with final results from four sites in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town expected six months later. Early results on safety will be gleaned from check-ups carried out after two weeks and three months, Fairlie said. Assessing the effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing Covid-19 is not the primary focus of the trial, she said.The study comes after researchers earlier this month started recruiting SA health workers to take part in a vaccine trial comparing the use ofThe health workers targeted for the study were part of the initial Sisonke trial, in which almost half a million people were given an initial dose of J&J’s vaccine.
A booster trial using a second J&J dose has already been run on some Sisonke participants. The government has in recent weeks begun offering both J&J and Pfizer boosters, with the stipulation that those administered with the vaccine get the same inoculation they received initially. SA has been the site of a number of Covid-19 vaccine trials, with studies run using shots made by J&J, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Novavax, ImmunityBio and Sinovac Biotech.
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