Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah has revealed that Malaysia is expected to receive the first batch of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccines on February 26th.
He added that once they arrive, the vaccines will be distributed in stages to all states within a week or two.
Malaysia was previously reported to have purchased 12.8 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine in November, and had subsequently committed to purchase an additional 12.2 million doses of the same vaccine last month.
In addition to that, the government also signed agreements to secure 18.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines produced by Russia's Gamaleya Research Institute and China's Sinovac.
Dr Noor Hisham further explained that to date, 141 volunteers have received injections in the Phase 3 clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine developed and sponsored by China's Institute of Medical Biology Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (IMBCAMS).
Meanwhile, he also hoped the late reporting of cases to the National Crisis Preparedness and Emergency Response Centre (CPRC) of the Health Ministry (MOH), including from private facilities, would be resolved within a week.
“What we see is private laboratories, when they get the results they have to include the results in the public health information system, so if there is a delay in entering the data, then we will receive the data late,” he said.
In an official statement released on Sunday (January 31st), Dr Noor Hisham said that the sharp increase in the number of recent daily cases, exceeding 5,000 on three consecutive days, is due to the late reporting of cases to the National CPRC, including positive cases detected in 2020.
This sharp increase in cases is due to targeted workplace screening, close contact screening and high-risk group screening conducted on a large scale in several states.
Let’s hope this means we’ll be out of the woods sooner. Please continue to follow SOPs and stay safe, everyone!
by Kyle Roshen Jacob
