KOTA KINABALU: Sabah is on track to receive one million Covid-19 vaccine doses by the end of this month.
Sabah Health director Dr Rose Nani Mudin said to date, 700,000 vaccine doses have been despatched to the state.
"By next week, we are going to increase the vaccination rate to 40,000 people a day from the current 15,000 to 20,000," said Dr Rose when met at the vaccine administration centre (PPV) at Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) here today.
She was accompanying Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor who had earlier visited the centre to view the ongoing vaccination process there.
She said the state had a schedule every week to place its request for the vaccine doses.
"I think until today we don't have much of a problem, of course there are delays in arrival for one or two days but we do have our vaccines delivered on schedule," said Dr Rose.
She said the vaccine supply is sufficient and there is no shortage as the state is continuously getting the stocks despite some delay.
She added that the states need to have the capacity in order to increase the stocks because the vaccines cannot be kept in storage for too long and must be used immediately.
On the delivery issue, Dr Rose said it is not only experienced by Sabah, but across Malaysia and other countries too, due to high demand as infections are increasing daily.
To get more people vaccinated, she said there was a need to restrategise and simplify the registration process to smoothen the flow because in some PPVs, they had discovered double registrations.
She said more vaccine doses should to be distributed to Kota Kinabalu due to its high population density as compared to the rural areas.
Dr Rose said members of the media can also play their role in disseminating information to the people that the vaccines are safe and help to reduce the mortality, death index and transmission of the virus.
"There are about 30-40 per cent of the population who refuse to get vaccinated," she said.
On the suggestions to open walk-in booths to speed up the inoculation process, she said such an approach was already planned.
She said the walk-in approach will be implemented when they had cleared up all the people who had registered via the MySejahtera app, otherwise it would be unfair to those who had waited for months.
At the moment, the walk-in vaccinations are only meant for senior citizens.