March 10, 2022
KUALA LUMPUR – Stop taking a “wait and see” approach with regard to vaccination of children, said Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin.
This was the plea he made to parents who have yet to vaccinate their children aged between five and 11 following a drastic rise in Covid-19 infections recently.
“I feel sad seeing the vaccination rate for children aged five to 11 is only at 30%.
“With the number of Covid-19 cases increasing, hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) admission rising, some parents still choose not to give their kids the protection.
“The time to ‘wait and see’ is over. I am pleading to parents, do not waste time, get your children vaccinated,” he said in a press conference in Parliament yesterday.
Data has shown that incidents of infections among young children have drastically increased, he said.
Between mid-February and March this year, he said, the number of children aged below 12 infected with Covid-19 was 68,893.
Khairy said this was an increase compared to the period between January and mid-February, when the number was 50,826.
He added that this meant 111,719 children below 12 were infected since January.
“This is a drastic rise in infections among children and it was expected due to the reopening of schools,” he said.
Khairy also said that some parents have refused to bring in their children for vaccination under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme for Children (PICKids) despite having appointments to do so.
“We registered 1.63 million vaccination appointments via MySejahtera but only one million were vaccinated.
“This means that over 600,000 did not come for their appointments,” he said, adding that efforts to get young children vaccinated would be ramped up in light of schools having reopened.
He added that infected children requiring hospitalisation for Category 3 and 5 have also seen a drastic increase by 94%.
Khairy said the ministry would closely monitor to see if new and more aggressive Covid-19 variants emerge.
“I have briefed the Cabinet on this, in case more aggressive variants emerge.
“It will affect not only Malaysia but also other countries,” he said, adding that a review of the Covid-19 protocols may be done during the transition phase if this happened.
On a separate matter, Khairy said that a report on a review over the autopsy performed on 13-year-old Revnesh Kumar was handed to his parents yesterday.
The report, he said, was based on examination of the autopsy report by a panel of forensic experts headed by the nation’s chief forensic officer, Datuk Dr Zahari Noor.
Revnesh died on Jan 16, 18 days after receiving his first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
On March 4, Khairy, health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah and Hospital Serdang forensic specialist Dr Emizam Mohamad met up with Revnesh’s father Naresh Kumar Lachmenou and his mother Vijayarani Govindan to brief them on the ongoing investigations into the death of their son.