No vaccines wasted in Sabah, says state health chief

KOTA KINABALU: The Sabah Health Department has denied claims that unused Covid-19 vaccines are being thrown away.

Department director Datuk Dr Christina Rundi said there was "no truth at all" to such talk of unused vaccines being thrown away or wasted.

Dr Rundi said in a statement on Thursday (May 20) that such claims only interfered with the implementation of the National Covid-19 Immunisation programme in the state.

She was responding to Api Api assemblyman Datuk Christina Liew's call to the department to investigate public chatter about claims that unused vaccines were being thrown away at dispensing centres.

Dr Rundi said that at the moment Sabah was using the Pfizer and Sinovac Covid-19 vaccines which need to stored at a certain temperature.

"Vaccines are only taken out the cold box storage when due to be given to recipients.

"At no point has a vaccine not been used (when taken out of storage) because there was no recipient," she said in the statement.

She said Sabah received the first batch of vaccines in February and dispensed it to frontlines from March 1.

Dr Rundi added that a total of 151,063 vaccine doses have been administered to the high-risk group above age 60 under phase two of the immunisation programme, which began on April 19.

As of Tuesday (May 18), Dr Rundi said, 92,961 people have been given their first dose while the remaining 58,309 have received their second dose.

Dr Rundi also explained that there was still low registration for the vaccine in Sabah with only 16.1% of the population having registered up to Tuesday.

She said the registration rate was different for each district because of various localised factors.

"As an example, the urban area of Putatan district has a registration rate of 42.1% while (the more rural) Kinabatangan district recorded only 5.18%," she said, adding that the city registration rate was only about 24% with 105,213 people registering.

She urged the public to register and help the vaccination drive in Sabah be a success.