I am extremely concerned about how Sabah is going to achieve herd immunity by early next year as the current National Immunisation Plan (NIP) does not address the issue of large number of stateless and undocumented persons who are residing in Sabah.
The Prime Minister has just announced another RM2billion allocation to the NIP with the hope of getting more Malaysians vaccinated as fast as possible. However, announcing huge allocations without specifying how the government is going to spend it has somewhat become the standard trademark of this PN government. Up till now, I have not seen any concrete plan to tackle the issue of getting all those stateless and undocumented in Sabah vaccinated. This is going to be a massive obstacle in preventing us from achieving herd immunity. Without herd immunity, it could affect the reopening of our border as well as business and social activities in the state.
Based on the Department of Statistics figures, Sabah has a population of about 4 million. This includes all the documented foreigners living in the state. On top of this, we have a large population of undocumented person, which could range anywhere from 100 to 300 thousands. This means that we will need to vaccinate close to 3.5 million people in Sabah in order to achieve herd immunity. How is the government plan to do this when we don’t even have a record of how many undocumented person are there in our state? And with this huge undocumented population living “under the radar”, how is the authority going to reach out to them for the vaccination programme? Without this group getting vaccinated, can Sabah achieve herd immunity? The government cannot remain silence on this issue and pretend things will work out on its own.
Moreover, up till 17 Mach 2021, Sabah has only managed to vaccinate 35,537 person, 22 days after the immunisation programme started in the state. This worked out to be slightly more than 1600 person a day. Assuming that the authority can ramp up the vaccination rate per day by 4 times to about 6400 person per day, to get 3.5 million people here inoculated, we will still need at least 547 days to achieve that. This will bring us to the 2nd half of 2022 before we can talk about any possible herd immunity. This is way too far off from the target date announced by the government itself.
Hence, the government must come out with a clear strategy to vaccinate and protect Sabah, and not only concern with looking after their own ministers.