KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia's supply of AstraZeneca from the Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access (Covax) facility is from SK Bioscience, the vaccine manufacturer in South Korea and not the Serum Institute of India which has been hit by export curbs imposed by the republic.
Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said the country's supply of the vaccine should not be disrupted by India's export restrictions, unless the overall supply chain was affected.
He assured the public that he would look into the matter further, stressing that the export restrictions should not affect Malaysia's supplies.
Khairy also said he received AstraZeneca's delivery schedule from the company's contract manufacturing plant in Thailand today which confirmed that delivery of Malaysia's consignment of vaccines would start in June.
He said the first 600,000 doses of the vaccine would be delivered then and subsequent deliveries would arrive monthly. This, he added, was a direct consignment from the manufacturer.
He said this during the launch of the Corporate Collaboration for the Covid-19 Immunisation Programme here, today.
Reuters previously reported that India has put a temporary hold on all major exports of the AstraZeneca vaccine shot made by the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world's biggest vaccine-maker, in order to meet domestic demand following the rise of infections.
The move would also affect supplies to the GAVI/WHO-backed global COVAX vaccine-sharing facility, through which 64 lower-income countries are supposed to get doses from SII, the programme's procurement and distributing partner UNICEF, it added.