KOTA KINABALU, May 27 — The Sabah government and Kanger International Berhad today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to obtain the supply of Sinopharm vaccine against Covid-19 for people in the state.

Under the MoU, the state government agreed to appoint the company as the sole distributor of Sinopharm vaccine for Sabah after its usage has been approved in this country, while Kanger International will obtain the vaccine to be supplied to the state government.

Permanent Secretary of the Sabah Finance Ministry, Rusdin Riman and Kanger International executive director, Steven Kuah signed the MoU at the Sabah State Administrative Centre, here, today.

Kuah told reporters that the company would obtain approval from the government through the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency Negara (NPRA) before bringing the supply into Sabah.

"The process of registering the Sinopharm vaccine (with NPRA) has started and we hope to receive the good news of approval for the vaccine soon.

"We believe that cooperation between the public and private sectors will be beneficial and speed up the vaccination exercise in Malaysia,” he said, adding that the total number of doses to be supplied to Sabah would be decided on later.

Kuah said the company viewed this initiative as important to support and complement the government’s efforts towards achieving herd immunity in Malaysia to curb the spread of Covid-19.

Currently, only three types of vaccine against Covid-19 are being used in Malaysia, namely, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac and Oxford-AstraZeneca. — Bernama