PUTRAJAYA, Feb 24 — Starting March 1, parents and guardians can bring their children to get the vaccine under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme for Children (PICKids) at selected vaccination centres (PPVs) on a walk-in basis.
Deputy Health Minister Datuk Dr Noor Azmi Ghazali, in a statement today, said the state health departments will issue the list of PPVs through their respective websites in the near future.
“Parents and guardians are advised to check the list of PPVs implementing walk-in vaccination and take the opportunity to vaccinate their children during the school holidays,” said Dr Noor Azmi who is also the Covid-19 Immunisation Task Force for Children (CITF-C) chairman.
As of yesterday, 661,752 children aged between five and 11 in the country had received their first dose of Covid-19 vaccine under the programme which began on February 3.
Dr Noor Azmi said the average vaccination rate was around 50,000 doses a day and if the capacity was increased to 60,000 doses a day, the target to give one dose of the vaccine to 70 per cent of children could be achieved by the end of March.
He said states with the highest vaccination rate are Sarawak at 34.7 per cent, followed by Melaka (31.6 per cent), Penang (25.7 per cent) and Perak (24.4 per cent) while states that have not yet reached 10 per cent are Kelantan (6.1 per cent), Terengganu (7.5 per cent) and Sabah (8.9 per cent).
A total of 3.6 million children are targeted to receive the Covid-19 vaccine under PICKids to reduce the risk of infection in schools and prevent clusters among school children.
Dr Noor Azmi said that only the Comirnaty (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine would be used for PICKids and children will be given two doses of the vaccine within an eight weeks interval to ensure optimum protection against the virus.
In addition, he said the Health Ministry will activate the appointment booking system in the MySejahtera application in stages from today to receive the vaccination appointments starting March 7.
“Through this method, parents and guardians can select the suitable date, time and venue for vaccination,” he said.
The appointment booking steps are available on https://covid-19.moh.gov.my/vaksin-covid-19/pickids/semasa/2022/02/langkah-langkah-mendapatkan-janji-temu-vaksinasi-pickids-melalui-mysejahtera.
— Bernama
