What would you think if I told you that Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin works until 1am every day? Perhaps you would say that as he’s the coordinating minister for the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme, he should be working hard. Or you might believe that despite putting in those hours things are still not moving fast enough and KJ should consider sleep a luxury.
It’s all about context, really. A fact in itself may be true but what it means depends on the background that surrounds it.
Take for example an article published earlier this week about vaccination passports that mentions Khairy had previously proposed easing movement restrictions for the fully vaccinated. But when you read that original article in which he makes that proposal, you realise he is talking about the bigger picture of easing restrictions in general. Specifically, when looking at recommendations for fully vaccinated people, he said “We need to determine the thresholds where we would be able to ease certain restrictions, whether it should be 30% or 40%.” Clearly, he doesn’t mean that a person is 30% or 40% vaccinated; he’s talking about 30% or 40% of the population. But the article doesn’t make that clear.
Fortunately, Khairy talked about this again recently, though it has not been reported on much. During a talk hosted by the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Malaysia on YouTube on June 16, a question was asked about interstate travel. Khairy's answer was that a certain “critical mass” of people need to be vaccinated first.
Specifically, he said that data from other countries suggests that the number of deaths drops tremendously when 40% of the population has been fully vaccinated. He added that Malaysia would start into a recovery phase when 60% of the population has been fully vaccinated. “Then we can start allowing for interstate travel, ” he said.
I think it’s important to pause here to understand this. It’s not a case of whether you or I can travel because we are vaccinated, it’s whether enough of us are. Hopefully when that happens, it will bring the number of infected cases down, which means you’ll be much less likely to bump into somebody who can infect you.
Whatever the case, the short-term goal is still to get as many people vaccinated as possible. But everyone must already know this, it’s been a hot-button issue in the press. The question is, how long will it take?
Khairy has said the immunisation programme is aiming to fully vaccinate 40% of 26 million targeted people in Malaysia by the end of August or early September. As part of that, it is focusing on completing vaccinations in Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and Selangor by then, while also recognising Sarawak’s efforts to hit a similar milestone in time for its state elections.
This sounds like great news. It sounds like everybody in the Klang Valley will be able to mingle freely by Malaysia Day. However, that might not necessarily be the case.
During that talk, Khairy was very adamant that he didn’t want to use the phrase “herd immunity” and wanted to discourage others from doing so in this context. The big concern is that Covid-19 will be endemic and that it will always be around in some form.
That is why the Covid-19 variants are such a cause for concern, and Khairy said whether 40% or 60% of the population vaccinated is enough to relax restrictions depends on the caveat about how serious the variants are. We may need to maintain precautions even when everyone is vaccinated.
The truth is that from an administration level, it’s a numbers game. When enough people don’t have the virus, then it’s OK to go back to normal. But if the virus is always around, or the virus becomes more dangerous, it’s hard to say how easily that will happen.
All the policies and precautions put in place are aimed at trying to push that number down, be it with vaccinations, wearing masks, or the dreaded movement restrictions. There are other things that we might be able to do in the future, like booster shots, self-testing (you keep your own Covid-19 self-test device at home and check your status every morning, for example), or even a cure.
So the context of the “new normal” sort of depends on what kind of Covid-19 situation we will have.
As Khairy pointed out to the audience during that talk, we need to remember that behind those numbers are real people, and mortality figures represent a loss of human lives. Decisions made at a committee level have outcomes for individual lives, he said.
And that, it seems, is the context for that 1am bedtime: “I spend the last two hours of my day from 11pm to 1 in the morning going through my emails looking at individual cases, sitting down with my team virtually to say, ‘Guys, can you fix this guy’s appointment, he’s been sent somewhere miles away from his place?’ I’m looking at his name, trying to remember his name.”
“Because I can only make effective decisions in the abstract when I know that they mean something to somebody.”
Couldn’t you say that’s true most of the time anyway?
In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@thestar.com.my. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Get 20% OFF The Star Digital Access
Cancel anytime. Ad-free. Unlimited access with perks.
