SHAH ALAM, July 5 — Mass screenings and expediting the vaccination process is the key towards the success in combating the Covid-19 outbreak, says Dato’ Seri Amirudin Shari.
The Selangor Menteri Besar said he has many times made his stance clear during meetings with various state and federal agencies, including the prime minister and Coordinating Minister for the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK).
“In the end, scientific studies have the strongest and most credible evidence. I am glad to see that Malaysians are beginning to have a better understanding of the steps being taken.
“We (Selangor) have aimed to increase the vaccination rate to 135,000 doses a day in July and 165,000 by the end of August,” said Amirudin in an interview with Sinar Harian today.
Amirudin said the country should learn from the action taken by England and China in its other initiatives to curb Covid-19 spread despite both countries being vaccine manufacturers and could have only focused on the immunisation process alone for its people.
“Instead, England had launched a mass screening programme called Operation Moonshot and had carried out 209,341,895 tests for its 68 million population, which is three times the number of its population,” said Amirudin who also cited the fast action taken in Guangzhou, China, in handling the recent spike in Covid-19 cases.
“We should not be looking back. We have enforced all sorts of movement restrictions since 470 days ago. I have always emphasised humility in my leadership. If we make a mistake, we should amend it immediately and learn from others.”
Amirudin said the state government had launched the Selangor Vaccination Programme (Selvax) where a total of 2.5 million doses of vaccine are allocated for the programme for 1.25 million individuals in the state.
He said the programme, which was launched on June 30, includes the Selvax Community initiative, which aims to inoculate 250,000 individuals from the elderly and B49 groups, and Selvax Industry for workers in the state.
Selvax Industry will distribute the vaccines that are purchased by employers, especially those in the manufacturing and services sectors, to eliminate workplace clusters and allow operations to continue should movement restrictions be imposed in the future.
“In short, the initiative is to complement the Federal government in expediting the vaccination programme,” he said.
Aside from the immunisation initiative, the Selangor administration had also carried out several mass testing initiatives to identify positive cases in the community and in hotspot areas since March last year.
