SA’s biggest pharmaceutical manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare, began supplying the government with Johnson & Johnson (J&J) coronavirus vaccines on Monday, dispatching 1.49-million doses to the department of health in a major boost to the country’s serially delayed inoculation drive.

The government has so far received only 1.5-million of the 31-million doses it ordered from J&J, hobbling its original plans to provide the single-shot vaccine to rural areas and harder-to-reach communities when it launched its mass vaccination programme in May. The government has to date largely relied on limited supplies of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which requires two shots...