KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 — The Selangor state government’s SELangkah team has admitted to registering people for AstraZeneca-Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine without their consent, the Covid-19 Immunisation Task Force (CITF) claimed today.
The federal CITF said it uncovered mass bookings of the second round of the opt-in stream for AstraZeneca’s vaccine, from last Sunday to Wednesday, through a few IP addresses, one of which belonged to SELangkah, the Selangor state government’s Covid-19 contact tracing app developer.
“SELangkah informed us that they made bookings for AstraZeneca slots without first checking if the individuals in the ImuniSEL database consented to receiving AstraZeneca vaccines, thus replacing any appointments that were given prior,” CITF said in a statement today, referring to the offline vaccine registration platform by the state government.
“SELangkah has given a guarantee to cooperate with CITF to resolve this issue and to ensure that the affected individuals will get back their original appointments.”
Several Malaysians had complained on Twitter about receiving later dates for AstraZeneca vaccination than their earlier scheduled appointments under the non-AstraZeneca stream of the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK), despite not having registered for the AstraZeneca shot.
PICK is currently in its second phase targeting people vulnerable to developing severe disease or dying from Covid-19, like the elderly, those with underlying health conditions, or people with disabilities.
Vaccine Minister Khairy Jamaluddin announced yesterday that the AstraZeneca vaccine would no longer be offered via opt-in, due to reduced hesitancy observed from overwhelming response to registrations. The national Covid-19 vaccine rollout will soon instead allow people to choose their desired vaccine — AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Sinovac are the currently approved shots — and appointment dates.
