Khairy: 60% of 2.2 million seniors who signed up for vaccination will have received first jab by mid-June

PETALING JAYA: More than two million senior citizens have registered for the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme and three out of every five would be vaccinated by June 15, says Khairy Jamaluddin.

The programme's coordinating minister said out of the 2, 256, 257 million senior citizens who have registered, 855, 124 have received their first dose of vaccine.

He noted that 436, 244 have received appointments up to mid-June.

“From this information, almost 60% of the elderly who have registered have either received their first dose or will receive their first dose by the middle of June.

"Others will receive their appointments as soon as possible, ” he told a joint press conference with Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Adham Baba on Wednesday (June 9).

Separately, Khairy also addressed claims that the government was not prioritising senior citizens for vaccination.

Khairy stressed that it was not the case that the elderly were not prioritised, but about vaccine supply and capacity.

“We are ramping up (vaccinations). I welcome the suggestions and the criticisms, and there are many things we can continue to improve. But to say that the present system is unable to prioritise certain groups of people is simply not true, ” he said.

Khairy said the fact that 60% of the registered senior citizens will be vaccinated by mid-June is because their information could be easily accessed by the RM70mil National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme data integration and appointment system.

He said this when asked about former energy, science, technology, environment and climate change minister Yeo Bee Yin's criticisms that the system was unable to extract the list of senior citizens and special groups for vaccination appointments.

She had said that the information retrieval required to get these groups sorted could be done with the filter, sorting and logic functions in Microsoft Excel.

However, Khairy said a proper system was needed, not just a simple spreadsheet, as they were dealing with billions of data points with 15 million registrations.

“The data size that you need to process is in the tens of gigabytes. You need a proper server and system to do this.

"When you deal with data sets this big it is very difficult to use Excel. The standard Excel can only take a maximum of just a little more than one million rows of data, ” he said.