‘Sabah can vaccinate 40,000 folk a day, but PPVs need a boost’

KOTA KINABALU – Sabah has the resources to administer 40,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses a day, but to achieve this, the capacity of vaccination centres (PPVs) in the state needs to be enhanced, said state Health director Dr Rose Nani Mudin.

She said Sabah currently vaccinates around 15,000 to 20,000 people a day at its 151 PPVs.

However, the state government is facing a string of problems like slow registration and, sometimes, double registration.

While the arrival of 1.1 million vaccine doses to the state is on schedule, Dr Rose Nani said there is a need to “simplify” procedures to increase the capacity of state PPVs.

“We are receiving the (vaccine) doses according to schedule, but we can expect a delay of between one or two days.

“We are going to increase inoculations to 40,000 doses by this week. We already have the vaccine. We are requesting the federal government to only top-up a bit more to achieve this.

“I have been to a few of the PPVs recently, and we need to simplify the procedures there to scale up the number of vaccinations,” she told reporters at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah PPV here today.

Dr Rose Nani said health authorities are also looking into the technical and distribution side of the process, so that more vaccines are allotted where they are most needed, like in densely populated Kota Kinabalu.

She stressed that there is a need to encourage everyone to get vaccinated, noting that some 30% of those called in for appointments have refused.

Getting vaccinated reduces the risk of dying from Covid-19, and lessens the seriousness of the infection and chances of being infected, she added.

On a similar matter, Dr Rose Nani said the department is also looking into scaling up procedures for walk-ins, which are now limited to only senior citizens who depend on manual registration.

However, she added, walk-ins cannot be the main approach in the immunisation exercise as there is still a huge backlog of registered recipients via MySejahtera who have yet to be jabbed.

“We have walk-ins, but we also have a list from the MySejahtera app. We want to give priority to them first. We are trying to clear that first.

“People have already registered in MySejahtera since March. We need to give them (the vaccine) first. It is not fair for them.” – The Vibes, July 22, 2021