THE government should reveal the age profile of people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to date, so that the public is assured that there are no double standards or concerns about queue-jumping, DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng said.

“The Perikatan Nasional government or MySejahtera (developer) should disclose fully and transparently the age profile of those vaccinated to reassure the public that front-liners (including teachers and those working in essential services) and senior citizens (are getting) priority, and first preference for the vaccines,” he said in a statement.

He said a similar practice is carried out in many Western countries, where a complete profile of age groups is disclosed to the public to show that vaccination priority is given to senior citizens and vulnerable groups.

“This would also serve to allay concerns that there are younger people and those not in the high-risk or vulnerable groups receiving vaccines beforehand, through unethical means,” Lim said.

Withholding such information would only “deepen the existing trust deficit between the public and PN,” he added.

As it is, Lim said there is a huge trust deficit, because Malaysia is now among the worst countries in the world in dealing with the pandemic.

“Such trust deficit is not helped by serial policy flip-flops and Covid-19 SOP U-turns, as well as double-standard in the enforcement of movement control order (MCO) restrictions between VIPs and the people.

“Failure to fully disclose information would not help to repair the breakdown of trust towards the PN government, which led us through an emergency proclamation and three MCOs but still failed abjectly to contain and check Covid-19,” Lim said.

Malaysia’s national immunisation drive began on February 24 starting with front-liners and then senior citizen and high-risk groups. However, the vaccination programme has been riddled with accusations of queue-jumping, besides problems with the online vaccination registration system, whereby people do not know where they are in the queue to receive the vaccine.

As of June 1, a total of 3.1 million people have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. Of this, 1.1 million have received both doses.

As for registrations, 12.41 million people have signed up for vaccination by midday yesterday. – June 2, 2021.