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Malaysia said on Wednesday it was talking to Pfizer and other companies to secure more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to cover 83% of its population, and is drawing up plans to organize ultra-cold storage in its tropical heat.
The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Khairy Jamaluddin, tweeted yesterday that after signing agreements with Covax, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and finalizing agreements with Sinovac, CanSino and Gamaleya, Malaysia will have vaccines for almost 83 percent of the population at a RM2.05 cost. billion.
“And the NPRA (National Drug Regulatory Agency) is working on approval right now.”
“I am not ruling out the possibility that we will slightly increase our orders,” he said.
The first shipments of the AstraZeneca vaccine obtained from COVAX are expected to arrive in Malaysia between March and June, with subsequent doses later in the year, while the first orders for AstraZeneca doses purchased separately in direct negotiations are expected to arrive in April or May.
Khairy also revealed that the government has chosen to acquire the Covid-19 vaccine by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford under the COVAX portfolio to cover 10 percent of Malaysia’s population.
Malaysia previously joined the COVAX facility under the “Optional Purchase Agreement” agreement that allows the government to select vaccine manufacturing companies participating in COVAX to source supplies for 10 percent of the country’s population.
Malaysia is in talks to buy 6.4 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and wants to increase its purchases from US pharmaceutical company Pfizer-BioNTech as the country seeks to bolster its arsenal against the pandemic.
Negotiations are still ongoing with those three vaccine developers, as the deals have yet to be finalized.
Malaysia hopes to buy enough supplies to inoculate 26.5 million people, or more than 80 percent of its population, Reuters reported.
The Malaysian president said that the agreements with Sinovac, CanSino and Gamaleya would also provide added value to local science and technology sectors that would benefit the people and development of the country. Johnson & Johnson is also a single shot. “
“Once the Pfizer vaccines arrive, we hope it will be a just-in-time vaccination rollout,” he said.
Khairy said the government is also in the final stages of negotiations with three other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing companies, Sinovac and CanSinoBIO of China and the Gamaleya National Center of the Russian Federation, as long as those companies can add value to development. of vaccines in the country. “This is an important process before we have the ability to carry out the entire vaccine development process,” he said.
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