At a press conference, Khairy said this included 12 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine, 2.2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and 1.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Khairy said the 2.2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is among the 12.8 million doses the government had just bought from the pharmaceutical giant.

With the vaccines here, Khairy said the vaccination rate is expected to increase to 150,000 injections a day by next month.

Khairy said he was confident of meeting this target as the vaccination rate recently hit 99,000 doses a day. He also said more vaccine centres will be set up to facilitate the increased number of jabs.

“With this, I hope Malaysians who have not received any appointment will be given one in the coming months. God willing, the vaccine programme will be implemented quicker.”

On delaying the interval between doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Khairy said the doses can be given up to six weeks apart, but this would depend on the prevalence of the newer, more aggressive Covid-19 variants.

He said although the strategy of delaying the interval between doses allows for more people to receive the vaccines sooner, the threat of the new variants must also be taken into consideration.

“If the variants are prevalent, we may not extend the interval between doses because the effectiveness of a single dose against the South African variant has not been proven.”

He added the authorities and universities were conducting genomic sequencing to detect new variants and they were looking to do more within the next few weeks.

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