KUCHING, June 3: The federal government should have allowed state governments and private hospitals to procure their own vaccines as soon as vaccines were available and approved by world health authorities.
To Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr James Jemut Masing, the tough stance of limiting the only procurement authority in Malaysia to the federal government is an act of reinventing the wheel.
“This should have been done as soon as vaccine was discovered and approved by WHO (World Health Organisation) and FDA (Food and Drug Administration of the United States of America).
“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It has been invented for us, all we have to do was (sic) to acquire and distribute,” said Masing in a press statement today.
Apart from buying and distributing vaccines, other methods to fight Covid-19 appeared to Masing as “simply a waste of resources, time and lives of Malaysians”.
Masing who is the Baleh assemblyman was responding to the announcement by Coordinating Minister for the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (Pick) Khairy Jamaluddin today that state governments and private hospitals are allowed to procure Covid-19 vaccines which are not in the federal government’s procurement list but approved by WHO.
Highlighting China’s Sinopharm and the USA’s Moderna vaccines, Khairy stated that any state government or private hospital may go ahead to purchase these vaccines, whereby the federal government may even “facilitate them”.
He explicitly mentioned that the federal government is not stopping any state government from acquiring its own supply of Covid-19 vaccines and denied that there has been any monopoly on the supply of Covid-19 vaccines to Malaysia.
Khairy who is Technology, Science and Innovation Minister further pointed out that state governments or private hospitals only have to register themselves with National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) for them to get on with vaccine procurement. — DayakDaily
