The government will conduct a dry run on January 29 to transport saline-filled bottles at minus 70 degrees Celsius from a Covid-19 vaccine storage centre in Sarawak to a vaccination site in Belaga district, Kapit, Sarawak.
Malaysia will be receiving one million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s ultra-cold Covid-19 vaccine in February 2021, but regulatory approval is estimated to take 90 to 120 working days.
The government is also procuring AstraZeneca’s vaccine under COVAX to cover another 10% of the Malaysian population, on top of direct purchases to cover 10% of the population.
Singapore signed NDAs with Covid-19 vaccine developers to access confidential data on the progress of candidate vaccines that was not yet available in published literature, without being tied to purchasing the vaccines.
A Covid-19 vaccine must be first registered by the US’ FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), among the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency's (NPRA) requirements for vaccine approval in Malaysia.
Safety or lower efficacy issues with Chinese vaccines, which have yet to show Phase 3 clinical trial results, could delay vaccine access for Asian countries to the end of 2021, says Fitch Solutions.