Govt makes U-turn on vaccine choice

[superadmin]

PETALING JAYA: The government has decided against allowing people to choose their vaccine, National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme coordinating minister Khairy Jamaluddin said today.

On Thursday, Khairy said Putrajaya was looking at adding a feature to the MySejahtera app to allow the public to have the vaccine of their choice.

“We thought about (allowing people to have a choice) initially, but now the concern is to increase and ramp up the (vaccination) numbers. So, we will just give whatever we have,” he said.

“If we give them an option, maybe that will slow things down,” he said at a press conference after visiting the vaccination centre at the Malaysia International Digital Entrepreneurs Centre (Mitec) in Kuala Lumpur.

The Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) had earlier supported the idea of having people choose their vaccine, telling FMT that it would be better in case those who are hesitant decide against getting vaccinated at all.

“Giving people the chance to select their vaccines would instil greater confidence in Malaysians that they are receiving an effective vaccine and not one of the dregs,” it said.

Currently, there are three vaccines available to Malaysians, from Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac and AstraZeneca.

While AstraZeneca was earlier taken out of the national programme and only open to voluntary sign-ups, this decision has since been reversed due to the high demand seen once applications opened up in a number of states.


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