PRIVATE hospitals are already being used as vaccination centres for private healthcare workers in phase one of the immunisation drive, said Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation Khairy Jamaluddin in response to the Pakatan Harapan Covid-19 vaccination committee’s call to the government to establish a public-private partnership for the vaccination programme.

“Private hospitals, eg. Pantai, are already being used as vaccination centres for private HCW for phase one,” he said on Twitter.

“We will include more private hospitals for phase two and three as I have announced previously. It will be ‘all hands on deck’. 75-150k/day through put is for later phases,” added the co-ordinating minister for the national covid-19 immunisation programme.

This, the PH committee said, will address capacity constraints and achieve herd immunity quickly, adding that Khairy said in January the target was to administer 75,000 doses of vaccine a day.

“However, as of February 28, the same minister said in a tweet that only 15,923 Malaysians have been vaccinated on that day.

“We are not sure if the daily target of 75,000 injections could not be achieved this week because it is the first week of the vaccination programme, but this may be an early sign that the vaccination system, currently being run by the Health Ministry, may not have the capacity to reach the target of 75,000 injections a day,” the committee said in a statement today. 

The committee said capacity constraints will be more pronounced in the second and third phases of the programme, which will involve 9.4 million and 13.7 million people, respectively – far exceeding the 500,000 people in Phase 1.

“As a more proactive measure, the ministry needs to immediately consider collaboration with private hospitals to ensure the success of the programme more quickly in order to achieve the 80% herd immunity level of immunisation,” the committee said. – March 3, 2021.