Medics urgently need mRNA jabs, say doctors

The minutes quoted a senior official advising the government to not give the Pfizer vaccine to medics, saying: “It will imply that the quality of the Sinovac vaccine given to them earlier is low, and it will be difficult for us to find a reasonable excuse.”

In response to this, the group has demanded that the government procure mRNA vaccines as soon as possible for the public and frontline medics, especially in the face of soaring infections from the Delta variant.

The leaked document said the 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine donated by the US will arrive in Thailand this month and will be administered to seniors and women over 12 weeks pregnant who live in Covid-19 red zones.

The group has urged the government to release the purchasing contract for AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines to prove the jabs were not bought because it was financially beneficial. The government is also being pushed to publicize all meetings held on vaccine management in Thailand.

The group is also demanding that medics be provided with FFP3 and N99 facemasks to protect themselves from the new variants of Covid-19.

In a message posted on the “We, The People” Facebook page on Monday, the group called on medical personnel and general people to wear black or at least a black ribbon on Wednesday to commemorate those who have been affected or have died from Covid-19.

Last week, immunologist Dr Prapaporn Pisitkun said on Facebook that she caught the virus from a Covid-19 patient despite having received both jabs of the China-made Sinovac vaccine.

She said she had checked her neutralizing antibodies (NAb) to monitor her immune response after the inoculation. Two weeks after the second dose, her NAb was high at 92.9 per cent, but dropped to 65.7 per cent two months later.

Prapaporn said that though her immunity is not low, it is not high enough to protect her from the Delta variant.