The first lot of Sinovac vaccine from China will arrive in Bangkok on Wednesday at 10am at Suvarnabhumi international airport, Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said Sunday.
To confirm that the COVID-19 vaccine will definitely arrive on schedule, the minister showed a three and a half minute video clip to the media, showing Chinese workers moving stacks of boxes, containing the vaccine, from a warehouse and loading them onto a container to be flown to Thailand by Thai Airways International.
The consignment carries a message, reading: “Hello Sinovac Vaccines. Have a safe flight. See you on Wednesday!”
More doses will arrive through to April, amounting to two million doses.
It is reported that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has accepted an invitation to attend the “COVID vaccines, restoring the Thai Smile” event to take delivery of the vaccines at THAI’s warehouse at the airport on Wednesday.
Thailand’s well-known virologist, Dr. Yong Poovorawan, of Chulalongkorn University, said in his Facebook post today that, once Sinovac vaccines arrive in Thailand, they must be administered to high-risk groups as quickly as possible, to stop the spread of the virus and gradually restore normality so the economy can start to recover.
He disclosed that more than 200 million doses of various vaccines, such as those from Pfizer, Sinopharm, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Sinovac and Sputnik V, have been given to people worldwide and their side effects are similar to those caused by flu vaccinations.
