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.

Illustrative photo. (Source: bangkokherald)

The Thai government is working with AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford to jointly produce the vaccine at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant of Siam Bioscience Group near Bangkok. Siam Bioscience Group was selected by the UK-based pharmaceutical firm as its regional partner to produce the vaccine for the Southeast Asian region.

The plant can produce 15 million doses per month at full capacity.

Nakhon said he was confident that AstraZeneca will get vaccine approval soon from the UK’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as it has a high efficacy rate of 70 percent that is higher than the WHO's requirement 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 Disease Control (DDC).

The department said that it requires two million doses per month from the plant.

Source: VNA