Science, technology and innovation minister Khairy Jamaluddin said the deal will be signed this week while Pfizer has also offered to supply more vaccines to vaccinate a further 20% of the population, although this is still being negotiated.
“For all 32 million doses from Pfizer, which will be signed this week, its delivery will be in 2021. All of it,” he said in a joint press conference with health minister Dr Adham Baba today.
Up until now, Malaysia has received around 520,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and that is expected to increase to one million by the end of the month, with another batch arriving on Thursday.
Meanwhile, 200,000 finished doses of the Sinovac vaccine will arrive in Malaysia, split into two batches on Friday and next Friday. The vaccine will be used in the first phase of vaccinations under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme.
Khairy also said Malaysia might end negotiations with Johnson & Johnson for its one-dose vaccine since it can only be delivered next year.
Instead, he said, Putrajaya is negotiating with CanSino Biologics Inc for its vaccine, which is also one-dose and can arrive this year.
Meanwhile, Adham said Malaysia does not plan to suspend the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine yet, despite Austria’s decision to do so while investigating the death of one person and the illness of another after the jab was administered.
He said the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency had only given conditional approval to the vaccine and will ensure that the vaccine is safe to be used here.
“Our priority is to protect the recipients,” he said.
Meanwhile, Khairy said he received over 200 complaints of vaccine queue-jumping since last week, adding that he has probed and addressed each one.
He said there was one case where all frontliners in the area had already been vaccinated, so the excess vaccines were then offered to non-frontliners.
Khairy clarified that all non-frontliner appointments had since been cancelled while the remaining vaccines will be redistributed to other areas that had not yet finished with vaccinating frontliners.
“Maybe the planning wasn’t clear enough, which made them decide to give the remaining doses to people who are not on the frontliners list. But we’ve asked them to redistribute the additional doses to other hospitals or vaccine centres.”