By Selangor Journal Team
SHAH ALAM, Aug 24 — The Selangor government has received a total of 7,499,702 Covid-19 vaccine doses as of August 23, says Dr Siti Mariah Mahmud.
The state executive councillor for public health said the state had received a low number of vaccine doses at the start of the National Covid-19 Immunisation (PICK) in February, with a total of 52,650 doses.
The figure had gradually increased, and in July, Selangor received a total of 3,794,800 doses.
“From the cumulative figure of Covid-19 vaccine doses that were delivered to us, 3,364,920 doses were of Cominarty (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccines, 3,874,982 doses of CoronaVac (Sinovac) and 259,800 doses of AstraZeneca,” she told the Selangor State Legislative Assembly today.
Meanwhile, Dr Siti Mariah said the state administration’s immunisation plan could have started earlier if the Federal government had released the doses of vaccines procured by the state sooner.
Answering a supplementary question by Banting state assembly Lau Weng San on the delay in receiving the vaccines procured by the state, she said the 2.5 million doses were purchased in February but were only released in June.
“The total doses were already allocated for us, but the vaccine distributors were not allowed to deliver it to the state until (part of) the national vaccination plan was completed.
“We could have started much earlier and had planned to have it as a backup to get the younger population inoculated and complement the Federal programme because we know Phase 3 (of PICK) will take a longer time,” she said in reference to the third phase which involves vaccinating adults aged 18-years-old and above, scheduled to run from May to December.
“Perhaps if we had started earlier, the young adults could have been vaccinated sooner, and we would have been able to reduce the (Covid-19( death rate among the younger people.”
The Selangor government had in June launched its Selangor Vaccination Programme (Selvax) to complement PICK.
The state had procured 2.5 million doses for its Covid-19 vaccine rollout, which targets to fully inoculate 1.25 million people in four months via the Selvax Industry and Selvax Community initiatives.
