PUTRAJAYA must practise “vaccine equity” as the priority now is to immunise healthcare workers before rolling out the Covid-19 vaccine to the rest of the population, DAP’s Lim Kit Siang said.

He said this in response to anecdotal accounts on social media that VIPs, as well as their family members, were “cutting queue” and receiving the vaccine before front liners did.

“The government must fully embrace the concept of vaccine equity, where priority is given to health workers to ensure the success of the Covid-19 vaccination rollout in Malaysia.

“This call to action is at the heart of the World Health Organisation’s campaign for vaccine equity,” the party veteran said.

The WHO’s vaccine equity campaign centres on the premise that vaccination of health workers and older people must come first before the rest of the population.

More than 236 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, and Malaysia began the first of its three-phased, year-long immunisation programme earlier this week to vaccinate at least 80% of the population.

Front liners, especially healthcare workers are to be inoculated in the current first phase, but there have been claims that several politicians and their family members and relatives are cutting the line.

Cabinet ministers and MPs are indeed meant to receive the vaccine in this phase, with the prime minister being the first person in the country to be injected at the programme’s rollout last Wednesday.

But other politicians, such as assemblymen and state executive councillors and their “kuncu-kuncu” were cutting queue, according to a public healthcare doctor named Rafidah Abdullah.

“Let us, healthcare workers, finish our vaccination first,” she wrote on Twitter yesterday.

“We, the underlings, who are just doing our work, don’t understand this double-standard,” she wrote in a series of tweets, also urging middle managers in hospitals to “get rid of such nonsense” and remove the names of those who are not front liners.

“It is important that the government should heed complaints of vaccine inequity as expressed by Malaysian front liners, most notably by Dr Rafidah Abdullah on Twitter,” Lim said.

He said vaccine inequity was an injustice to those who were denied it or poorer countries, who as yet still have no access to vaccines. – February 28, 2021.