KUCHING, May 29: DAP Sarawak has urged the Sarawak government to consider empowering all private healthcare facilities to roll out vaccine shots and allow walk-in vaccination in order to hasten Covid-19 vaccination in Sarawak and achieve its August’s target.
Democratic Action Party (DAP) Sarawak chairman Chong Chieng Jen suggested this in welcoming the announcement that Sarawak will be allocated 350,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines per week starting June with 4.4 million doses by end of August.
“This would mean that Sarawak will be the first State to complete the national vaccination programme in Malaysia and that the Sarawak government does not need to purchase vaccines on its own.
“In order to achieve this target, the vaccination process and standard operating procedures (SOP) must be simplified and made more accessible to the people,” he said in a statement today.
To achieve the target of completing vaccination for 2.2 million people in Sarawak by August, Chong, who is also Kota Sentosa assemblyman, thus urged the Sarawak government to adopt the proposals of the Federation of the Private Medical Practitioners’ Associations Malaysia.
“In gist, to distribute the vaccines to all private clinics and allow the private GPs (general practitioners) to administer the vaccination at their respective clinics and to allow walk-in vaccination without having to first register with MySejahtera and wait for the computer programme to allocate the time and places for the vaccination,” he said.
National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (NIP) Coordinating Minister Khairy Jamaluddin during his working visit to Sarawak yesterday had given assurance to deliver 4.4 million vaccine doses to Sarawak by end of August.
He informed that the large shipment of vaccine to Sarawak will begin in the first week of June with an estimated 380,000 doses.
Promising to deliver the vaccine supply on time to Sarawak, he said that there would be continuous delivery of vaccines weekly until the total amount of vaccines delivered reached the 4.4 million doses by the end of August.
The doses, he added, will be enough to cater for Sarawak’s 2,084,678 adult population while additional vaccines will be sent as a buffer to vaccinate foreign workers, undocumented migrants and other eligible non-Sarawakians. — DayakDaily
