Thailand will receive the Covid-19 vaccine developed by British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford as early as mid-2021.
The vaccine will be produced locally at the Siam Bioscience Group production plant located in Pathum Thani.
The Thai government is working with AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford to produce vaccines at the factory.
AstraZeneca chose Siam Bioscience Group as its regional partner in producing vaccines for the Southeast Asian region.
National Vaccine Institute (NVI) director Nakhon Premsri told media he was confident the British pharmaceutical company would soon get vaccine approval from the UK's Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
"If the vaccine gets approval from the Thai FDA, we will start producing for the public in the middle of next year. We are confident that the vaccine made by AstraZeneca will soon get approval from the UK-based FDA, because it has a high efficacy rate of 70 percent, that's more. of that. Higher than the required WHO is 50 percent, "he explained. He said that currently Siam Bioscience Group is in the process of transferring technology provided by the company. After that, the factory will start production of the first finished vaccine delivery process for Thai FDA approval in March.
Results of phase 3 clinical trials have shown the AstraZeneca vaccine to be 70 percent effective and have jumped to 90 percent effective depending on the dose.
Reported by Nation Thailand, Siam Bioscience Group has a production capacity of 180 million to 200 million doses per year or 15 million doses per month. As a first step, his party will produce 26 million doses for 13 million Thais.
DDC Managing Director, Opas Kankawinphong, estimates Thailand needs 2 million doses per month and the rest will be exported to neighboring countries. With raw materials sent directly from the company, vaccines will be produced according to orders by the Department of Infectious Disease Control (DDC).
He also used the government to spend 3.7 billion baht on setting up transportation, vaccine storage, sick systems and campaigns to raise public awareness about how to get vaccines.
The Vaccine Council said it would reveal in December which groups would consider first taking into account the death rate, possible infection and so on. "Giving 26 million doses of vaccine to more than 13 million people in Thailand is unprecedented. What we have given is five million doses of flu vaccine. So we have to make everything work, especially in terms of creating awareness among the public," he said.
