COVID-19 | The cabinet is set to make a decision on whether the government will bear the costs of vaccinating foreign nationals.
Under the present vaccination plan, Malaysian citizens will not need to pay should they want to be vaccinated.
Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said today that ensuring foreign workers were immune from the virus was instrumental to achieve herd immunity.
Demanding that the workers or their employers pay for the vaccine could deter them from getting the jab, he added.
“We are trying to target as many (foreign workers) as possible.
“The principle is very simple, we need to vaccinate the foreign workers to make sure they are safe, and to make sure we are also safe. The more people you vaccinate, the safer you are.
“If we only vaccinate citizens but we do not vaccinate the three million foreign workers (in the country), we are still at risk because we may not reach the threshold for herd immunity,” Khairy explained during a press conference held at Parliament.
The government’s goal is to immunise 70 percent of the population - a threshold that studies say is sufficient to achieve herd immunity. Such immunity is supposed to slow the spread of Covid-19 and protect those who have not been vaccinated.
The World Bank previously estimated that there were between 2.96 million and 3.26 million documented and undocumented migrant workers in Malaysia as of 2017.
Malaysia’s population was 32.69 million as of the third quarter of 2020.
Khairy said the Covid-19 Guaranteed Vaccine Supply Committee, which he chairs, would be holding a meeting in the coming weeks to decide on the matter.
“We will be inviting the ministers of home affairs (Hamzah Zainudin), human resources (M Saravanan), and foreign affairs (Hishammuddin Hussein) where we will make a decision to recommend to the cabinet on whether we can give vaccines to foreign nationals for free.
“We have not decided yet,” he said. - Mkini
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