Thais to get first COVID-19 vaccination shots by mid-2021
Thai people will get their first jabs of COVID-19 vaccine developed by the UK’s AstraZeneca and University of Oxford by mid-2021 at the earliest, said Nakhon Premsri, Director of the National Vaccine Institute (NVI) of Thailand.
Bangkok (VNA) – Thai people will get theirfirst jabs of COVID-19 vaccine developed by the UK’s AstraZeneca and Universityof Oxford by mid-2021 at the earliest, said Nakhon Premsri, Director of the National Vaccine Institute (NVI) of Thailand.
The Thai government is working with AstraZeneca and theUniversity of Oxford to jointly produce the vaccine at a pharmaceuticalmanufacturing plant of Siam Bioscience Group near Bangkok. Siam BioscienceGroup was selected by the UK-based pharmaceutical firm as its regional partnerto produce the vaccine for the Southeast Asian region.
The plant can produce 15 million doses per month at fullcapacity.
Nakhon said he was confident that AstraZeneca will getvaccine approval soon from the UK’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as ithas a high efficacy rate of 70 percent that is higher than the WHO'srequirement of 50 percent.
With the raw materials directly shipped from the company,the vaccine will be produced made-to-order by the Thai Department of DiseaseControl (DDC).
The department said that itrequires two million doses per month from the plant./.
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Illustrative photo. (Source: bangkokherald)
