ADUN SPEAKS | How will PM vaccinate 27m people in a year?

ADUN SPEAKS | On Monday, the prime minister assured the country that our Covid-19 vaccination programme is on track and that the government expects to vaccinate 80 percent of our population or 27 million people over a period of 12 months, beginning from March.

The 12-month vaccination timeline given by the prime minister is certainly very encouraging compared to the grim 18-month vaccination timeline given by Minister of Science, Technology, and Innovation Khairy Jamaluddin just last week.

Notwithstanding the glaring different timelines given by the PM and Khairy, I must stress that the prime minister’s given assurance that the government’s vaccination programme is “on track” is not enough. The country’s vaccination programme is of huge national interest and importance, and the prime minister owes a duty to the public to lay out its full plan on how the government intends to fulfil its promise to vaccinate 27 million people in 12 months.

Details of the national vaccination programme have not even been unveiled by the government. Has it been finalised and presented to the cabinet for approval? Without details, how can we be sure if the country’s vaccination programme is on track? In addition, from what little facts that have been given to the public by the government, the numbers provided by the government also do not add up.

In order to achieve the prime minister’s target of vaccinating 27 million people in a period of 12 months, we would have to vaccinate an average of 2.25 million people a month starting from March. Do we have confirmed delivery dates and the quantities of all the vaccines we need to vaccinate 2.25 million people a month?

So far, the only confirmed timeline for vaccine delivery to Malaysia this year as announced by the government is the staggered delivery of 12.8 million doses of the Pfizer-NBioTech vaccine which will only be sufficient to fully vaccinate 6.4 million people. This falls far short of the 27 million people target set by the PM to be vaccinated within a year.

I stand to be corrected but in order to vaccinate 27 million people with two doses of the Covid vaccine, we will require 54 million doses available in the country to carry out two million vaccinations a month to reach the target announced by the PM.

Without confirmed delivery dates of the exact quantities of other vaccines such as AstraZeneca and Sinovac to Malaysia, how will the government be able to successfully achieve its promise to vaccinate 27 million people in one year?

Going further, Health Minister Adham Baba has also announced the good news that 500,000 of our frontliners will receive the first dose of their vaccination in the first quarter. However, does this mean that the rest of the general population, especially the vulnerable groups, the elderly and high-risk groups, will still have to wait for the second batch of delivery of the Pfizer vaccine in the second quarter of the year before they can get vaccinated?

The PM’s plan to vaccinate 27 million people within one year will be the biggest vaccination exercise in history to be undertaken by our government and which will require an unparalleled and massive undertaking to set up vaccination centres all over the country, deploy thousands of trained vaccinators, manpower, and other resources to effectively roll out the vaccination programme.

The PM cannot merely expect the people to place full confidence and blind hope in the government on the PM’s bare assurance alone that 80 percent of the country’s population will be given vaccination within one year without any specific details. 

Time is of the essence and I repeat my call to the government to unveil the national vaccination programme plan to the public without any further delay.

GOOI HSIAO LEUNG is assemblyperson for Bukit Tengah, Penang.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.