By Lian Cheng
KUCHING, March 1: Teachers with comorbidity are considered frontliners and will be entitled to be vaccinated under Phase 1 National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme.
This is affirmed by Deputy State Health director Dr Rosemawati Ariffin at the State Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) press conference today.
“Based on the instruction by the Health Minister (Datuk Seri Dr Adham Baba) and (Science, Technology and Innovation Minister) Khairy (Jamaluddin), teachers are frontliners but these teachers are those with chronic illnesses.
“These (teachers), we regard them as frontliners and they will be given the vaccines as instructed,” said Dr Rosemawati.
On Feb 21, 2021, Khairy said the Special Vaccine Supply Access Guarantee Committee would ask the Education Ministry to list down priority recipients among teachers to be vaccinated.
Khairy said there are constraints because of vaccine supply, but he had discussed with Dr Adham and Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah to accommodate teachers with comorbidities to be jabbed first.
Following the affirmation from Dr Rosemawati, teachers with comorbidities in Sarawak are expected to be among those to first receive the Pfizer-BioNTech ultra-cold vaccines.
Sarawak received its first consignment of 23,400 doses of Pfizer vaccine on Wednesday (Feb 24).
Its Covid-19 vaccination programme was officially rolled out on Feb 26 (Friday) after the these vaccines had been sorted and shipped out to identified vaccination centres across Sarawak on Thursday.
Sarawak will receive about 87,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine by March. — DayakDaily
