Coronavirus: Hong Kong’s elder care vaccination plan trying to save lives, not pressure older residents, minister says

Hong Kong officials have defended a plan to begin automatically scheduling residents of care homes for Covid-19 jabs, rejecting criticism that the government is unfairly piling pressure on the elderly to get vaccinated.

Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip Tak-kuen, who is in charge of Hong Kong’s inoculation drive, on Friday stressed that the city’s elderly population needed the jabs to protect themselves, pointing to a disastrously low inoculation rate of under 10 per cent at elder care facilities.