After signing the initial deal with the company last year, the Malaysian government today announced yet another deal with Pfizer in regards to the COVID-19 vaccine. Through the new deal, Malaysia will soon receive additional vaccine doses from the company to be distributed to its population.
Back in November, the government has announced that it has purchased 12.8 million vaccine doses from Pfizer which will be able to cover around 20% of the population. Under the newly announced deal, that number has now increased to 39% of the population as Malaysia has agreed to purchase an additional 12.2 million dosages which pushes the total number of available Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to 25 million dosages.
According to the announcement from the Ministry of Health, the pharmaceutical company will deliver the additional dosage to Malaysia throughout 2021. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has recently been granted the conditional registration status from the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency as noted by the Science, Technology, and Innovation Minister, Khairy Jamaluddin last week.
While COVID-19 vaccine will be provided for free to Malaysians, vaccination will not be made mandatory and those who want to take it will have to provide their consent via MySejahtera app. The first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is expected to arrive on our shores this February and the government has already allocated a multi-million budget to meet its ultra-cold storage requirements.
(Source: Ministry of Health.)
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