Malaysian Health Minister, Dr. Adham Baba has highlighted that Putrajaya is confident with the conditional approval given by the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) for the use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine in the country.
Malaysia will receive the vaccine as scheduled under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme.
However, the NPRA will be monitoring additional documents related to the side effects as some countries are postponing using the AstraZeneca vaccine due to its complications.
“We will be careful with what is reported based on the cases in other countries. We will also take all precautions and consider the specific reasons why the vaccine cannot be used by some individuals,” Dr. Adham said.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there are no reasons to stop using the AstraZeneca vaccine as examination of its safety data showed no association between the vaccine and blood clotting.
On the other hand, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland are some of the countries which temporarily stopped the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine as a precaution after receiving several reports of blood clotting cases among the recipients of the vaccine.
The vaccine received conditional approval from the NPRA on March 2 and the delivery of the vaccine to Malaysia will be made this month.
A total of 301,699 people have received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine under the first phase of the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme based on data collected by the Ministry of Health on March 15.
MySejahtera has recorded over five million Malaysians registering for the vaccination as of today [March 15].
