THE silence from those who have been vaccinated in Sarawak is unsettling as the local health authorities there are in the dark of any possible side effects, said Dr Radziah Mohamad.

Radziah, who is the principal assistant director, family health development section of the Sarawak Health Department, said not a single person who had been vaccinated in the last two days have reported the side effect they might have experienced after receiving their jabs.

“We are quite curious why these two days, there are zero reports of AEFI (adverse events following immunisation),” she said in a brown bag talk on the state’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign,

“We would like everybody to report any side effects they are experiencing even though it might be mild, like local injection pain or fever,” she said in the Sarawak Development Institute-organised talk.

Radziah said since the Covid-19 vaccine is a very new vaccine, health authorities and experts like her want to know how those who have been administered the jab are reacting to it.

“No report does not mean it’s (the situation) good,” she said.

She appealed to those who have been vaccinated to share their experience by uploading it onto the MySejahtera app.

Sarawak, like the rest of the country, has rolled out the second phase of the vaccination programme.

Radziah said with the exception of one case where a recipient had a severe reaction and had to be hospitalised, most of the side effects reported earlier were minor, mostly injection pain and fever.

She said the recipient who was hospitalised, a male, has an underlying medical problem, adding that he has recovered.

Fear of such adverse reactions play a large part in the minds of eligible Sarawakians who remain undecided if they should be vaccinated or reject it, according to a joint survey undertaken by the state Health Department and the state disaster management committee.

In the February 11 to 25 survey, 74% of the respondents accepted the vaccine, with 20% say they are undecided and 6% rejecting it.

However, a one-day national survey on April 16 undertaken by the Ministry of Health showed the acceptance level is at 85%, those undecided is at 10% and those rejecting the vaccine at 5%.

Questioning the safety of the vaccine, its effectiveness, the side effects that might be experienced and lack of confidence in the materials used in the vaccine are the main reasons why 15% of Malaysian are still holding out or rejecting the vaccination.

In Sarawak, 2,019, 431 of its citizens under the age of 18 are eligible for the jab. So are some 200,000 foreigners residing in the state.

The state targets to end the vaccination campaign by the end of August, much earlier than the national target of February 2022. – April 21, 2021.