The Malaysian Insight

MEGA vaccination centres will not help boost the uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine booster shots as private centres were seeing a high dropout rate in appointments, the Malaysian Medical Association said today.

Its president Dr Koh Kar Chai said the capacity utilisation at private centres nationwide was only at 60%, and the government should work on getting the 40% to come for their appointments.

“There is no point in opening up large facilities to administer boosters when the dropout rate is high.

“It will be a waste of funds and resources, which can be put to better use in areas more urgently needing help in our healthcare system,” he said in a statement today.

On Thursday, Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin tweeted that mega vaccination centre would soon reopen in the Klang Valley.

“In our effort to ramp up booster shots, mega PPVs (vaccination centres) will be reopened starting with Klang Valley.

“All 60 and above or Sinovac recipients must get the booster latest by Feb 2022 to keep fully vaccinated status,” Khairy said.

Currently, Koh said over 130,000 booster doses were being administered daily, on average, by the 2,459 private vaccination centres registered under ProtectHealth – a company under the Health Ministry.

“The total number of booster shots administered so far is at 4.2 million or 18% of the population.

“Its programme, coordinated by ProtectHealth, is running smoothly. However, there is a high dropout rate in appointments for the booster shots,” Koh said.

These private PPVs include private general practitioner (GP) clinics, specialist clinics, private hospitals, ambulatory care centres, offsite/outreach vaccination centres and non-governmental organisations.

“There is hesitancy among the public on receiving heterologous vaccination, therefore, more efforts are needed to reassure the public that heterologous boosters are safe.

“From the feedback that we are receiving, many are unwilling to receive the Pfizer shot after being fully vaccinated with Sinovac.

“When there is no choice given, many will choose not to accept the booster shot,” he said.

Koh asked the Health Ministry to encourage private medical practitioners to open smaller outreach PPVs within the community instead of a bigger centres.

“Private medical practitioners have contributed to 48% of total vaccinations nationwide.

“We believe booster uptake will improve in the coming weeks, but the people will need some convincing and encouragement.

“One of the best ways to achieve this is through the PPV GPs who are regularly in contact with their patients,” he said.

Koh also commented that there were many cases of mega vaccination centre clusters in the past.

“And now with the highly transmissible Omicron variant, we could see another super spreader event,” Koh said.

He said that mega centres were also a costly affair, citing that MMA was informed the government had to pay heftily for utilities and set-up earlier this year when the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme was launched.

Civil servants, army personnel, traffic police, Rela, volunteers and public healthcare workers were also roped in from all over the country to manage crowd control and registration at mega vaccination centres nationwide.

“Public healthcare workers should now be at the public healthcare facilities they are serving in as there are shortages in manpower in almost all the country’s public healthcare facilities.

“Appointments at public hospitals are also now picking up as many had earlier postponed their appointments due to lockdowns or fear of contracting Covid-19,” Koh said. – December 18, 2021.