Malaysia’s first batch of doses are expected to arrive by February, with Khairy, the science, technology and innovation minister, saying the delay was down to cost.
“Singapore signed (a purchase agreement) a few months before us because their financial ability is much bigger – let’s put it that way,” he told a press conference here.
“We took our time to get the best deal possible. If it’s a two-month variant, I think it’s reasonable.”
Earlier, in a tweet, Khairy said he was ready to meet the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to provide information on the vaccine procurement.
Responding to various Twitter users, one of whom questioned how the government could vaccinate 82.8% of the population for RM2.05 billion, Khairy said he was willing to explain the exact costs to PAC if its members consent to signing a non-disclosure agreement, as per the terms of the government’s agreement with Pfizer.
The government has committed to purchasing vaccines to cover 82.8% of the country’s 32 million population, with the first one million doses in February set to be given out to target groups such as frontliners, the elderly and those with non-communicable diseases.
Noting that countries such as Canada had enough supply to vaccinate each of its citizens five times over, Khairy added that high income countries had the capability to make “hundreds of millions” of advance purchases.
Responding to a recent Reuters article which claimed that the Covax facility might not be able to deliver vaccines until as late as 2024, Khairy said potential issues such as this were the reason why Malaysia wanted to have a “buffer” by building a portfolio of vaccines from six different suppliers.
Apart from the 20% of population coverage from Pfizer, 10% from the World Health Organisation’s Covax facility and another 10% from AstraZeneca, Malaysia is in the final stages of negotiations with Sinovac, CanSino and Gamaleya to acquire more vaccines to cover 42.8% of the population.
Khairy said Malaysia was also looking into purchasing enough Pfizer vaccines to cover another 20% of the population.
Combined with the lack of clinical trials on children, which will leave them out of the vaccination programme, Khairy said Malaysia would have enough vaccines “for all the adult population”.
Touching on a new Covid-19 variant in the UK linked to a recent surge in cases in the country, Khairy said Pfizer was monitoring the effectiveness of its vaccine against the new mutation.
“If it is not so effective, the company said that it would need about six weeks to tweak the vaccine. We will get that (tweaked) vaccine. I will insist on it.”
Noting the priority list of Covid-19 inoculations, Khairy said the matter was discussed during today’s Cabinet meeting – with recommendations to be made in January.
He raised the possibility that prison inmates and foreign workers could be given higher priority, especially the former as they had “nowhere to go” if there were outbreaks in prisons.
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