THE Health Ministry may consider making vaccination against Covid-19 mandatory in order to address the issue of anti-vaxxers, Khairy Jamaluddin said today.

In a stern manner, the health minister said that he was not far from proposing a mandate to make vaccination compulsory to the cabinet.

“For the time being, the government has maintained that we are not going to legally mandate vaccines as mandatory.

“I’ve not come to the stage where I would recommend to the cabinet a federal mandate but I’m not far from it either,” Khairy told members of the media in his first press conference at Putrajaya.

Khairy conveyed this message to those who refused the vaccine as a personal choice and not on medical grounds.

He added that the ministry was looking at a national testing policy in time to come, and said that regular testing would be applicable to those who choose not to be vaccinated.

“Those who refuse to get vaccinated will have to have a certain schedule or regime of testing that they would have to adhere to.

“Whether it is rapid test kits and if that (result) is positive, it will be confirmed through a PCR test,” he said.

An alternative to making Covid-19 vaccines mandatory, Khairy said that he encouraged sectoral persuasion.

“Sectoral persuasion is not a law, it is not a federal mandate but if a particular company says it wants you to come for a meeting or come to work, and that you have to be vaccinated, then that is up to the company,” he said.

He said besides this, the government would open more privileges to people who have been vaccinated.

When asked about those who have received one dose of vaccine but could not continue with a second due to a medical condition, Khairy said they would need a letter from a doctor to certify that and a feature will be enabled in the MySejahtera application for such people.

“As long as they have a doctor’’s confirmation that they cannot complete the vaccination on medical grounds, we will come up with a feature on MySejahtera to show that the person is somebody who cannot be vaccinated on medical grounds.

“We will also come up with SOP that is appropriate for those people,” he said. – September 1, 2021.