100 million Covid-19 vaccine doses to be procured by year-end: PM
The government aims to procure 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine for 50 million people before the year-end, Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha said on Friday evening.
In a statement on the government’s plan to combat the Covid-19 situation, the PM said that so far Thailand had received 2.1 million doses of vaccine for 1.05 million people. He said 840,000 people had already been vaccinated, about half of them medical professionals and volunteers who work in close contact with patients.
Prayut added that so far orders for 64 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been placed -- 61 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, which will start to arrive in lots from June onwards, and 2.5 million doses of Sinovac vaccine, 2 million of which have already arrived with the balance 500,000 doses arriving on Saturday.
“The government is negotiating with manufacturers to buy 5-10 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine and 5-10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, while the Board of Trade of Thailand would help procure another 10-15 million doses for its employees,” added Prayut.
“As for the treatment of patients, the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation has distributed over 300,000 tablets of Favipiravir to hospitals and is in the process of importing additional 2 million tablets,” said the PM. “Nationwide, we have over 28,000 hospital beds available for Covid-19 patients and suspected patients. This number includes public and private hospitals, field hospitals and hospitels.”
Regarding economic recovery measures, Prayut said the government had prepared a Bt380-billion budget for this purpose.
“Of this amount, Bt240 billion would come from the Bt1-trillion loan to deal with crisis, Bt100 billion would come from the 2021 fiscal budget and Bt40 billion would come from the Covid-19 mitigation budget,” said Prayut.
