MALAYSIA has taken delivery of its Covid-19 vaccine order from the Covax facility, comprising 268,800 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, last night, said Health Minister Dr Adham Baba.

“Yes, I can confirm that it arrived last night. These are the vaccines procured by the government through the Covax facility,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

“This batch is enough to cover 3% of the population,” he added. 

Adham said the vaccines arrived from the manufacturing plant in South Korea and the delivery was managed by Unicef.

However, he said the delivery is not linked to the recent review on the vaccine following safety concerns and was based on the previous decision by the Special Committee on Covid-19 Vaccine Supply Access Guarantee (JKJAV).

“JKJAV had decided in the initial stages to receive the stock of AstraZeneca vaccines through the Covax facility and it was given a conditional approval by the NPRA (National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency), which had evaluated the (vaccine’s) safety, quality and efficacy,” he said.

Covax is a global vaccine access platform coordinated by GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Malaysian government has ordered 6.4 million doses of the vaccine from Covax while another 6.4million will be procured directly from AstraZeneca.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is currently being reviewed by the JKJAV after reports on blood clots among recipients emerged from countries which has already started administering the jab.

The committee will be deciding on whether Malaysia will continue to use the vaccine.

On April 9, the Coordinating Minister for the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme Khairy Jamaluddin said during the meeting the government would scrutinise any additional information to be tabled by the panel of experts from the Health Ministry before making any decision.

He said the government took note of the report from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which confirmed for the first time that there was a link between the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clotting cases. – April 24, 2021.