One million doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine will arrive in Thailand today, says the Chulabhorn Royal Academy (CRA).
The first batch of one million doses will be delivered at 11 am from China. Samples will be sent to the Department of Medical Sciences for quality checks on Monday and Tuesday, the CRA said on its FB page.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the vaccines will be distributed to hospitals and medical facilities nationwide where the shots will be administered on Friday.
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Meanwhile, Yong Poovorawan, the head of the Centre of Excellence in Clinical Virology at Chulalongkorn University, said more than 700 volunteers have been recruited for clinical trials on the safety and efficacy of mixing COVID-19 vaccines made by different pharmaceutical companies.
The study only needed 90 volunteers, but it drew an overwhelming number of interested applicants only six hours after it was announced, Dr Poovorawan said, thanking those not chosen to join the study.
Dr Poovorawan previously said that changing vaccine formulas can be necessary in some cases, for example when a patient has an allergic reaction to their initial dose.
If mixing COVID-19 vaccines is proved to be safe and effective, it may be proposed as an option to improve the speed of the country’s mass COVID-19 vaccination drive, he said.
The study will focus on switching from a first shot of the Sinovac vaccine to a second of AstraZeneca, and vice versa. Participants in the study are between 18 and 59 and live in and around Bangkok.
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