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The National Department of Health calls on the Democratic Alliance to immediately retract and apologise for a statement issued on January 14, 2020, entitled ‘Was National Treasury the real culprit in vaccine delay?’

In the statement, DA MP Geordin Hill-Lewis incorrectly and perhaps purposefully misrepresents comments made National Department of Health Deputy Director General Dr Anban Pillay in a recent interview published in the Financial Times.

Dr Pillay did not suggest that National Treasury delayed South Africa’s COVID-19 vaccine acquisitions.  

In fact, sections of the article where Dr Pillay is quoted reads:

In an interview with the FM, health department deputy director-general Anban Pillay says though many countries secured vaccine doses in advance, even they are battling to get their hands on stock. The only vaccine currently available from manufacturers is the Pfizer vaccine, he says.

Under the Public Finance Management Act, goods must be delivered before payment is made. Any deviation from this (as would be required for an upfront payment to secure a vaccine order, for example) could only be agreed to by the Treasury.

The first problem, says Pillay, is that many manufacturers simply could not pinpoint a delivery date. “That was a big challenge,” he explains, as the Treasury “would have had to invest billions with nothing to show for it upfront”.

The DA suggests in its statement that. from the above extracts, Pillay suggested that the National Treasury “was the primary culprit in delaying vaccine acquisition”.

This is an extremely mischievous distortion of facts and we demand that the DA both retract and apologise for their statement.

Issued by The Department of Health