MyEG Services Bhd recently signed a letter of intent (LOI) to purchase 10 million doses of Anhui Zhifei Biopharmaceutical Co Ltd’s COVID-19 vaccine, with delivery to start as early as August when vaccination through the private market is allowed by the government.
The company claimed in a filing with Bursa Malaysia that they have exclusive distribution rights for the vaccine in Malaysia for three years, while the company has a separate agreement to distribute the vaccine in the Philippines for two years, and they are currently in negotiations to distribute the vaccine in other countries.
The vaccine’s use in Malaysia’s private vaccine market will be subject to conditional authorisation by the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) and its pricing will be determined after the agency gives the thumbs up.
The three-dose COVID-19 vaccine was jointly developed by the Institute of Microbiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical. The jab is already in use in China and Uzbekistan, with more than 60 million doses already administered in more than a dozen provincial-level regions, including Beijing.
It is both China’s as well as the world’s first recombinant subunit protein vaccine, a type of inactivated vaccine that only uses the very specific parts (the subunits) of a virus or bacterium that the immune system needs to recognise the microbe, instead of the whole thing.
According to Zhifei Longcom’s website, the second and third shots of the vaccine should be administered 28 and 56 days after the first injection, respectively.
(Sources: The Star, Global Times, WHO // Images: Xinhua)
