Health Ministry to study reasons for low vaccine registration

SEGAMAT: The Health Ministry will look into the actual reason why so many people have yet to register for the Covid-19 vaccination.

Its minister, Datuk Seri Dr Adham Baba, said only 7.6 million out of 26.7 million people eligible for the vaccination had registered through the MySejahtera application, which was equivalent to about 30 per cent of the population.

“The ministry sees this as a low figure, so we want to find out if the campaign is inefficient or people are afraid of taking it, or if they lack information on how it works.

“The figure is not satisfactory and it is low. Our target under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (NIP) is 70 to 80 per cent.”

He said this after officiating at the Segamat district-level “Malaysia Prihatin Vaksinasi Covid-19 Lindungi Diri, Lindungi Semua” programme here yesterday.

Present was Segamat member of parliament Datuk Seri Dr Edmund Santhara Kumar and Johor Health director Datuk Dr Aman Rabu.

Dr Adham said the reason behind the less-than-encouraging registration figure could be that people were taking a waitand-see approach.

He was concerned that the lower registration would impact the government’s rollout plan of the vaccines at the last minute.

He said the ministry would use agents from each district as a mediator to the community to channel information on the vaccination.

He said manual registration counters at public health clinics and private health institutions had been set up to ease the registration for those who were not tech-savvy.

“Since vaccinations began, infection among Health Ministry (personnel) has also been on the decline.

“The data translates into a success (for the inoculation programme).”

Up to last month, 6,087 ministry frontliners were infected with Covid-19.

The figure includes 2,276 nurses, 816 medical officers, 537 healthcare assistant, 534 assistant medical officers, 340 graduate medical officers, 133 medical specialists, and 1,451 other personnel.

He said the success of the drive was a benchmark for the country to lower the infection rate, once the second phase kicked off on April 19.