KUCHING: The Sarawak government will come up with its own system to address complicated issues pertaining to eligibility of Covid-19 vaccine recipients.
Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah explained that eligible recipients for Covid-19 vaccines and their appointments would be notified through the MySejahtera app.
“However, we encountered a number of problems whereby there are senior citizens who do not check their MySejahtera app and hence, they did not know about their vaccination appointments.
“Kapit division revealed that they have a problem of identifying 80 recipients who had been allotted the vaccine. Some cases were due to the locality of the recipients which may not be the same as the address on their identity cards.
“As we move into the interior, the issue is becoming more and more serious due to lack of communication and connectivity and so on.
“Therefore, the state government will propose to Kuala Lumpur that we want to set up our own system to suit the complicated situations in Sarawak,” he told a press conference during his visit to the second phase of Covid-19 immunisation programme held at Stadium Perpaduan here today.
He further mentioned that Sibu also recorded a total of 72 cases of eligible recipients who could not be contacted.
Uggah who is also the Sarawak Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) chairman added that Sarawak had recorded almost 600,000 manual registrations.
“However, these data must be keyed into the MySejahtera app, so this is another issue that we have to sort out,” he said.
Uggah brushed off calls made by certain quarters who urged for priority to be given to certain areas.
“I think that this issue should not arise because we (state government) had formulated our own plans such that for the interior folk, we have requested for the single-dose CanSino vaccine to be allocated to Sarawak.
“Since this type of vaccine is a single dose vaccine, it will be easier for us to go to the interior and vaccinate the people at one-go.
“This is why we want to propose having our own system to address the arising problems because if we rely on the appointments scheduled by MySejahtera, there will be a lot of complications for us in Sarawak,” he explained.
