Since several companies announced the successful creation of vaccines for COVID-19 in the past few weeks, the world has been holding its breath to find out if the vaccines will get past the final stages of testing.



Good news is, we may not have long to wait to know the results.

Health Ministry’s director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said that the ministry would be receiving the phase-three result of clinical tests from at least one of 12 companies working on creating a vaccine soon.

Ministry has to scrutinise COVID-19 clinical trial reports

During his daily press conference, Dr Noor Hisham said that the government would have to first study official clinical reports on the COVID-19 vaccines before even deciding to administer it to the public.

“We have found 12 vaccine companies who are currently in clinical phase-three of their testing, but we only managed to have negotiations with 10 of those companies.

“What we were told is that there is a big possibility that one of the companies might release their report or provide their clinical phase-three report sometime next week, so we are waiting to read it.

“They have to send their report dossiers to the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) and the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because as long as the vaccine is not licensed, we cannot sell it here,” he reportedly said.


Dr Noor Hisham also said that the first batch of people getting the COVID-19 vaccines would not be “lab rats” as the process of getting vaccines approved is pretty stringent.

“The research has to show a level of efficacy we can be satisfied with and also without any side effects, this is the most important, and these steps apply not only for the COVID-19 vaccine but other vaccines for other diseases as well,” he explained.

Recently the government announced that it had cut a deal with Pfizer to get RM12.8 million worth of COVID-19 vaccines once it’s ready.