Azrul Mohd Khalib, CEO of the Galen Centre for Health and Social Policy, said the national immunisation programme would speed up only with improvements in the global supply of registered vaccines.

Speaking to FMT, he noted that Malaysia was queueing up with more than 90 other countries for access to the same supplies and therefore had no choice but to wait for its turn.

“The main issue is that there is a huge global demand and supplies are dependent on the ability of manufacturers to churn out millions of vials a day,” he said.

“If something were to happen to the manufacturers of the glass vials used to package the vaccines, there would also be a disruption. In most of these situations, there is little the government can do.”

Science, technology and innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin recently said there was a supply problem because some rich countries were overbuying vaccines for their citizens.

However, some countries that are poorer than Malaysia are vaccinating their citizens at a faster rate. Azrul said this was because they were getting some help in securing vaccines due to their socio-economic conditions.

Examples of these are Bangladesh, which is receiving millions of vaccine doses as a beneficiary of India’s vaccine diplomacy, and Colombia, which was the first country in the Americas to receive shipments from the Covax facility set up to provide vaccines for low-income countries.

“Malaysia as an upper-middle-income country is already doing what it can to procure more vaccines by diversifying the types and providers,” Azrul said.

Dr Lee Boon Chye, the former deputy health minister, said Indonesia had been able to quickly vaccinate a large number of citizens because it was involved in clinical trials of vaccines from China.

“Hence, it was given priority for vaccine supplies from China,” he said. “Malaysia was not involved in the earlier vaccine trials because we had few new cases after the first movement control order last March.”

Lee told FMT he believed the government should, for now, focus on encouraging the general population to sign up for vaccination.

“Only nine million people, less than one third of the population, have registered for vaccination, which is far too slow,” he said.

He criticised Putrajaya’s decision to donate 50,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“If we don’t have enough vaccines, why are we donating to other nations?” he said.

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