Stop painting rosy picture of vaccination rate, govt told - Free Malaysia Today

PETALING JAYA: The government should provide a daily vaccination rate instead of only announcing the rate on the days when the numbers are high, former science, technology and innovation minister Yeo Bee Yin says.

This comes after national Covid-19 immunisation programme coordinating minister, Khairy Jamaluddin announced that the vaccination rate recently hit 99,000 doses a day.

In a Facebook post, Yeo said she noticed that the government tended to announce the daily vaccination rate on the days when it was high to paint a better picture than the reality on the ground.

Citing a graph of the daily vaccination rates reported by the Covid-19 Immunisation Task Force (CITF) for the month of May, she said there were days when the vaccination rates did not manage to achieve 100,000 doses.

“Some of you believe that our daily vaccination rate is beyond 100,000 doses per day as it was on the day the minister announced it to the media and made the headlines.

“What many didn’t realise was that the day before, it was only 21,988 doses and the two days after fell far short of 100,000 doses per day,” she said.

Yeo called the Covid-19 Immunisation Task Force (CITF) to provide a seven-day average reporting on the daily vaccination rate to give more realistic views on the ground.

Further, she said Khairy must be clear as to when in June the government could achieve a daily vaccination rate of 150,000 doses per day.

“We urgently need more and faster action on the ground. This is not a war on headlines, we are fighting a real virus that needs a measurement that reflects real results on the ground,” she added.

Recently, Khairy announced that Malaysia would receive nearly 16 million more Covid-19 vaccine doses by July.

Khairy said this included 12 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine, 2.2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and 1.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

With the vaccines here, Khairy said the vaccination rate was expected to increase to 150,000 injections a day by June.

Meanwhile, health minister Dr Adham Baba said a total of 1,052,145 individuals had completed taking two doses of vaccines.

In a tweet, Dr Adham said another 1,860,864 individuals had received the first dose, bringing the total number of doses administered to 2,913,009.

He said the five states with the highest number of people having received both doses were Selangor (139,427) followed by Sarawak (109,934); Perak (97,558); Kuala Lumpur (94,399) and Johor (92,231).