THE Sabah government has no plans to issue identity cards (IC) or citizenship status to illegal immigrants who received the Covid-19 vaccine in the state, the state assembly was told today.

Chief Minister Hajiji Noor said this was to protect the rights and interests of the people of Sabah.

However, the state government will consider (issuing the identity card and citizenship) to natives of the state who still do not have identification documents,” he added.

He said this in response to a supplementary question from Ewon Benedick (Kedamaian-UPKO) on the matter.

Recently, the media reported Deputy Home Minister Ismail Mohamed Said as saying that the ministry would consider giving identity or citizenship cards to Covid-19 vaccine recipients in Sarawak and Sabah who do not have identification documents, including the natives, if they met the conditions.

Meanwhile, state Community Development and People’s Welfare Minister Shahelmey Yahya, to another question from Ewon, said Sabah had received more than five million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine since the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) was implemented.

Shahelmey, who is also the operations director of the state’s immunisation programme, said the vaccines comprised of 3.38 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac (1.28 million doses), AstraZeneca (189,990 doses) and CanSino (180,000 doses).

“We will be getting an additional 2.89 million doses (of the vaccine) of the vaccine supply in September,” he said, adding that the amount is sufficient to cover the state’s vaccination needs.

He said as of Tuesday (September 21), 59.4% of the adult population have been fully vaccinated, while 33.8% of the adolescents in the state have received the first dose of the vaccine.

On the vaccination programme for residents in rural areas, he said, a total of 733 vaccination outreach programmes had been implemented and a total of 358,284 people had been vaccinated. – Bernama, September 23, 2021.