S.Korea secures additional Covid vaccines for 23mn people

Seoul, Feb 16 : South Korean Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said on Tuesday the government secured additional Covid-19 vaccines for 23 million people, raising the total secured volume to doses for 79 million people.
Chung told an interagency meeting for Covid-19 response that the country will receive vaccine doses for 20 million people from the US pharmaceutical firm Novavax and additional doses for 3 million people from the US drugmaker Pfizer, respectively, Xinhua news agency reported.
South Korea had already secured Covid-19 vaccines for 56 million people, including doses for 10 million each from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, 20 million from Moderna, 6 million from Janssen and 10 million from the COVAX facility led by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Chung said the contract with Novavax was more significant as vaccines from the US company will be manufactured in local factories through the transfer of technology to a South Korean drugmaker.
He noted that it will play a big role in speeding up the development of homegrown Covid-19 vaccines.
The Novavax vaccines will be manufactured in the vaccine production plant of SK Bioscience, a pharmaceutical unit of South Korea’s third-biggest conglomerate SK Group.