KOTA KINABALU – Former Sabah deputy chief minister Datuk Christina Liew wants those caught administering unfilled syringes in Covid-19 vaccination efforts, to be severely punished as a deterrent.
The Tawau MP said this after receiving a complaint from a woman whose grandmother may have been jabbed with an empty syringe.
“The government should consider enacting a preventive law to make the heartless and irresponsible act of administering ‘empty syringe’ vaccine jabs a criminal offence.
“It should be deemed a crime for anyone to knowingly and deliberately administer ‘empty syringe’ vaccine shots.
“The Covid-19 pandemic is a matter of life and death, so health workers should not indulge in foolhardy practices.
“Health workers administering the jabs should not put more citizens’ lives at risk by shirking their responsibilities,” she said in a statement here today.
Liew, who is the Api-Api assemblyman, urged newly appointed state health director Dr Rose Nani to take preventive steps to stop the possibility of such scams in the immunisation programme.
Calling for more transparency in the vaccination process, she said there should be standardisation in the do’s and don’ts as to, for example, whether vaccine recipients are allowed to take photos of the process.
“I understand that some vaccination centres allow this to take place while others prohibit photography.”
Based on feedback, Liew said medical frontliners manning the centres, including vaccinators, are generally friendly, obliging, and helpful.
“However, it was reported to me that some were quite rude when questions were posed by vaccine recipients who wanted to clear their doubts.”
In this instance, the woman accompanying her grandmother in her eighties to a vaccination centre here wanted to be assured by the authorities that the elderly woman did receive her first dose.
“Under such circumstances, the vaccinator could have shown the empty syringe as proof but, I was told, that was not the case,” she said.
The woman involved said when contacted that her grandmother felt absolutely no side effects after her supposed first dose.
“She was her normal self, no pain in her arm at all, not even at the site of the so-called injection.”
According to the woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, she was watching the vaccination process attentively, and immediately queried after sensing that something was amiss.
“I saw with my own eyes that there was no ‘pushing’ action after inserting the needle. I saw some bubbles when the vaccinator pulled the syringe slightly before pulling out the needle, so I raised my voice to say there was no injection at that point in time.
“Instead of showing the empty syringe to me as evidence, if at all the vaccination was really administered, the health worker challenged me by saying, ‘Didn’t I inject? Didn’t I inject? I did inject.’
“That was after the vaccinator had bent down to discard the syringe in the clinical waste bin. I was not satisfied and demanded to see the doctor on duty in order to seek clarification.
“With my persistence, she (doctor) then checked the contents in the bin in my presence to find if there was any syringe (filled with vaccine) but couldn’t find any.
“In the end, my family decided to leave it at that because we couldn’t get any concrete proof,” she added. – The Vibes, July 23, 2021
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