Uncertain Moderna vaccine supply may hinder Korea's immunization goals

Health authorities said that if the six million doses of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine do not arrive in time, it could be hard to achieve the government's immunization goals.

Moderna had said that it would supply less than half of the 8.5 million doses scheduled for supply in August due to a production problem. However, it recently announced its plan to deliver 7 million servings by this Sunday after receiving a protest from the Korean government.

The government received 1.01 million doses on Aug. 23 but waits for a reply from Moderna of when it plans to supply the remaining six million doses.

Health officials expressed concerns that without the additional supply of Moderna's vaccine, their goals of providing the first jab of the vaccine for 70 percent of the population before the Chuseok holiday, set for Sep. 19-22 will be impossible. "If we do not receive the six million doses of Moderna's vaccine, it can affect the inoculation plans," an official said.

Separately, the government will introduce 1.53 million Covid-19 vaccine doses (1.05 million Pfizer vaccines and 450,000 Moderna vaccines) that it received through a vaccine swap agreement with Romania.

The government also said that it is in ongoing talks with Moderna to supply the latter's vaccines manufactured by Samsung Biologics in Korea first.

"Both the government and Samsung Biologics have made requests to Moderna several times about our wishes to use its vaccine manufactured in Korea rather than importing it from other countries," Lee Ki-il, a senior official at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, told reporters in a regular briefing. "However, nothing has been decided yet."

Samsung Biologics plans to start mass-producing Moderna's Covid-19 vaccines at its domestic manufacturing facilities sometime in the third quarter of this year. In addition, Moderna had announced that it plans to supply these vaccines to countries other than the U.S.

Korea has vaccinated 29,279,112 people – 11,037,895 with the AstraZeneca vaccine, 14,666,946 with Pfizer's vaccine, 1,204,889 with Janssen's vaccine, 2,369,382 with Moderna's vaccine – with the first shot of the vaccine up 246,806 from the previous day.

Korea's daily Covid-19 tally bounced back to over 2,000 on Wednesday, with the more transmissible Delta strain rising sharply ahead of a major holiday this month.

On Wednesday, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency confirmed 2,025 new virus cases, including 1,992 local infections, raising the total caseload to 253,445. Seven more people died from the virus, raising the death toll to 2,292 with a fatality rate of 0.9 percent.

The tally marked a sharp rise from the 1,372 cases reported on Tuesday. Daily cases have stayed above 1,000 for 57 consecutive days.

Health authorities have additionally expressed concerns that the growing number of variant infections is troublesome.

Among 3,455 Covid-19 variant cases tallied over the Aug. 22-28 period, the Delta variant accounted for a whopping 99.2 percent, the KDCA data showed.

To contain further spread of variant cases, the country plans to toughen measures on arrivals from Peru and Chile starting Sep. 10, requiring them to undergo seven-day quarantine at designated facilities on concerns over the Lambda variant.