PUTRAJAYA, Oct 26 — Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said he had to miss his daily Covid-19 media briefing yesterday due to an audience with the Yang di-Pertuan Agong Al-Sultan Abdullah Ri’ayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah and other Malay rulers.
The Ministry of Health director-general said the rulers were interested in knowing the latest progress in Malaysia’s fight against Covid-19 pandemic, and the latest information and progress on the availability of the vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“I missed our press conference yesterday as I had an audience with the Conference of Rulers. We discussed our progress in handling the Covid-19 pandemic from December last year until today,” said Dr Noor Hisham today.
“Not only that, they were also keen to know what the progress is regarding the availability of a vaccine and how we are conducting our field work.
“We began the third wave with an R-nought (R0) of 2.5 and managed to reduce it to 1.5 after implementing the conditional movement control order (CMCO). If we did not reduce this, I expect we could have seen cases in the three to four thousand daily,” said Dr Noor Hisham today during his Covid-19 briefings.
He said Malaysia still needs to reduce its R0 to below 1.0 and he said within the next three to four weeks they could see improvements in the situation due to the efforts made by officers on the field.
He said as far as the vaccine goes, nine studies have been conducted, and all are in stage three of the process of making the vaccine.
The MOH however has not gotten the report from these research studies and he had conveyed that to the Conference of Rulers.
“They were very keen on knowing the progress of the vaccine and its availability. I explained to them that the health ministry is looking closely at this as well.
“There are nine research papers on the development of the Covid-19 vaccine but we have not received the full report from the tests.
“Hence we are still looking closely at the development of the vaccine and are identifying how we can obtain it when available,” he added.
