Missteps derail vaccination efforts

With more Covid-19 vaccines coming our way, the government must not only activate more vaccination centres, but ensure our online registration platforms can deal with higher traffic.

Sometimes it helps to have a sense of humour.

We may have our faults, but hey, no one can accuse that Malaysians don’t know how to laugh at themselves.

How else can you attribute the sheer number of memes and Gifs on social media lampooning the authorities, the AstraZeneca voluntary registration site, the MySejahtera app and the sheer futility of getting a vaccine appointment?

Shambolic doesn’t begin to describe the fiasco that was Wednesday’s registration process for the second round of the AstraZeneca vaccine opt-in.

Hard questions need to be asked as to how a system that costs RM70mil failed to cope with the number of people attempting to access the registration site.

When the authorities announced that almost one million slots would be available from noon on Wednesday, they should have anticipated the surge in demand.

It was obvious that the recent spike in Covid-19 daily cases to 7,000 and the alarming daily death rate convinced a lot of fence sitters to apply for the opt-in rather than wait for their turn to get the Pfizer and Sinovac vaccines.

The previous opt-in was a massive success with 286,000 slots taken up within four hours. That was an indication that many more Malaysians would want to be vaccinated as soon as possible.

And yet, the organisers weren’t prepared. The anger online was palpable as people described their frustrations in trying to get a slot for their vaccines. Do we really need our blood pressure to spike just to go through a simple registration process?

Vaccines save lives. Period.

It’s a simple concept, something that the vast majority of Malaysians understand. But yet, there’s a sizeable minority, intelligent people no less, who are convinced that vaccines do more harm than good.

Just as all of us almost certainly know someone who has contracted Covid-19, we also, very likely, know of person(s) who are adamant about not getting vaccinated.

The government has been trying to educate the population to get vaccinated, as the faster we do so, the more likely we will develop herd immunity and win the battle against the pandemic.

So, we absolutely cannot allow a repeat of this tech failure to derail our vaccination efforts. This would only add fuel to the anti-vaxxers’ conspiracy theories.

The media reported on a few incidences of recipients who were given less than the required dosage. This also fuelled talk of a cartel selling vaccines.

This talk seems to have diminished because nurses or doctors administrating the jabs are now required to show the full vial before injecting and an empty syringe after.

As more people are vaccinated, I have noticed a disturbing trend. It appears that there are those who have been vaccinated consider themselves immune from getting the virus. In addition, they also believe that the people who have yet to receive their jabs should be excluded from restaurants, malls, retail outlets, etc.

Both these assumptions are false. You cannot consider yourself as “untouchable” even if you have received both doses.

You could still get infected and even though it would no longer be life-threatening, you could end up a carrier and pass it on.

This government should also ensure that those people who are either unable to take the vaccine for medical reasons or who are vehement anti-vaxxers are not ostracised by society.

But this is putting the cart before the horse as the latest statistics show that only around 4% of Malaysians have received both doses, with our daily vaccination rate increased to about 70,000 doses.

This is a big increase compared to even a month ago, but it is not nearly enough.

At this rate, it will take us a further 22 months to achieve our target of herd immunity with 80% of the population vaccinated.

It is imperative we get our vaccination capability beyond a 100,000 daily doses.

The vaccine task force needs to allow more private hospitals to assist with vaccinations and they should even consider big multinationals or large organisations that can convert part of their premises into vaccination centres. Hopefully, more of these new channels will be activated in all states soon.

We’ve been promised 2.5 million daily doses of Pfizer and Sinovac a week by mid-June and if that really happens, we need to ensure our online platforms are up to par to ensure that people are given slots as soon as available.

Kudos to our frontliners and volunteers at existing centres who have done an incredible job of shifting thousands of people through daily with an average vaccination timeframe of one hour.

These medical personnel can expect an even more hectic period when the vaccination process is ramped up in the coming months.

At that point we should have a number of vaccine options at our disposal – AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Sinovac and possibly Sputnik V and Johnson & Johnson.

So, which one is best?

I’m glad I received the AstraZeneca jab two weeks ago, but it doesn’t really matter, because I would have been happy with any other vaccine. The best vaccine is the one in your arm.