Khairy: Manual vaccine registration to be done via house-to-house

 

A new house-to-house community outreach programme will be implemented to manually register people for the Covid-19 vaccine, said Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin. 

It will be handled by the National Disaster Management Agency (Nadma) and focus on communities in rural areas, he said. 

"I would like to announce today that there will be an outreach programme coordinated by Nadma with the military's involvement to make house-to-house visits, especially in rural areas and the interiors, in order to do face-to-face registration where the Internet is limited.

"Our targets are communities that do not have good access to digital devices or the Internet, so that we can register them manually.

"These efforts are important as we near April, which is when Phase 2 (of the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme) will start at a date we will announce later," he added.

Khairy was speaking at a press conference today in Putrajaya, held jointly with Health Minister Dr Adham Baba.

In Selangor alone, he said, they have identified almost 50 nursing homes where manual registration will be done for the senior citizens.

Meanwhile, Khairy said the second batch of 100,000 finished Sinovac vaccine doses arrived today.

As the government is now confident with the delivery schedule of the vaccines, he said it is no longer keeping half the existing vaccine stock in reserve for the second shot.

Instead, the stock will be used to give more people at least their first shot of the Covid-19 vaccine, Khairy added.

He said this could lead to Phase 1 of the immunisation programme being completed faster.

According to the minister, the government will discuss tomorrow when to begin Phase 2 in April and the date will be announced next week. - Mkini