LIKE his peers in Singapore and Indonesia, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin is expected to be inoculated against Covid-19 on national TV soon after the first batch of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrives in Malaysia on Feb 26. That he only needed to test negative for the coronavirus but not serve quarantine before meeting Indonesian President Joko Widodo in Jakarta on Feb 5 may well be due to the fact, in part, that Widodo had received his second dose of Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine on Jan 27.
Malaysia should enjoy some semblance of “normalcy” by the third quarter of this year if the national vaccination programme goes well and vaccine supply comes in within the reported indicative timeline (see table).
COMMENT | How to manage vaccine liability in Malaysia
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COMMENT | Public confidence is crucial for the success of Malaysia’s Covid-19 immunisation programme. To build public confidence in the vaccine, we must answer the question of “what happens if there’s an adverse event from the vaccine?”. We would like to explain the situation and propose a framework to manage liability arising from the rare occasions of an adverse event.
For a start, we would like to firmly state that the currently available data for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine shows a strong safety profile. The risk of a serious adverse event from a vaccine is extremely low. Among 20 million people worldwide already vaccinated so far with the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, the overall adverse event rate reported was approximately 0.02 percent . That is much safer than the effects of actually getting Covid-19.
As Malaysia prepares to vaccinate frontline workers, health experts are looking forward to a vaccine partnership with China that will give Malaysia a much-needed shot in the arm.
January 26, 2021
People wearing protective masks walk on a street, amid the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Nov 10, 2020.
Reuters
Covid-19 numbers in Malaysia continue to soar a year to the day since the country’s first case was detected – but after more than 180,000 infections, 678 related deaths and two nationwide lockdowns, public health experts are now concerned that the nation’s contact-tracing efforts are falling dangerously short.
People who have tested positive for the disease have taken to social media to complain that they had not yet been contacted by health officials, while contact-tracing applications such as MySejahtera and SELangkah are overwhelmed, with reports indicating that thousands of close contacts are potentially being missed on a daily basis.
Published on: Monday, January 18, 2021
By: FMT
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Enforcement officials have been checking on premises to ensure all standard operating procedures are being followed. (Bernama pic) - FMT
PETALING JAYA: A public health specialist has suggested that the government set a list of key performance indicators (KPI) to determine when to call off the emergency and movement control order (MCO), instead of depending on the daily number of new Covid-19 cases.
Dr Khor Swee Kheng said focusing only on the number of cases, or even the infectivity rate, was problematic as these were metrics that could be easily influenced.
“Using a single KPI will lead to an unstable situation where we are over-dependent on that KPI,” he said, adding that the complex Covid-19 crisis required the incorporation of several KPIs to measure “pandemic severity”.