Health minister Khairy Jamaluddin said the vaccines were secured through the Covax facility and direct negotiations with several manufacturers.

“The RM4.64 billion includes the cost of the logistics involved,” he said in a written reply to Nga Kor Ming (PH-Teluk Intan).

Nga had asked the ministry to state in detail the total amount the government had spent to buy the vaccines, who the manufacturers were and the number of doses donated by other countries.

Khairy said the government had secured vaccines from six manufacturers, including Gamaleya Sputnik V, which supplied 6.4 million doses for 10% of the population.

The government also procured the AstraZeneca vaccine from the Covax facility (6.4 million doses for 10% of the population) and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (44.8 million doses for 70% of the population).

Besides that, other vaccines such as AstraZeneca from Oxford University (6.4 million doses for 10% of the population), Sinovac (20.4 million doses for 31.8% of the population) and CanSino (3.5 million doses for 10.9% of the population) were also procured.

Japan donated 998,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on July 1, the US one million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on July 5, China 500,000 doses of Sinovac on July 16, and the UK 415,000 doses of AstraZeneca on Aug 3.

Khairy said the donations amounting to 2.9 million doses were worth about RM5.8 million.

He said Malaysia had also received 100,000 Pfizer-BioNTech doses as donations from Singapore and one million doses of AstraZeneca from Saudi Arabia.

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