KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 — The Selangor state government’s SELangkah today denied any involvement in booking inoculation slots for AstraZeneca-Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine, after Putrajaya accused it of registering people without their consent.
SELangkah, which developed the Selangor state’s Covid-19 contact tracing app, also said the federal Covid-19 Immunisation Task Force (CITF) had not contacted them as alleged.
“SELangkah will not hesitate to take legal action against any party that issues false allegations with the intention of smearing our reputation,” SELangkah CEO Tengku Iesta Tengku Alaudin said in a statement.
CITF claimed earlier today that SELangkah had admitted to registering people for AstraZeneca vaccination — during the chaotic second round of the opt-in stream for AstraZeneca’s vaccine from last Sunday to Wednesday — without first obtaining the consent of these individuals.
CITF alleged that SELangkah had made mass AstraZeneca vaccination bookings for individuals on the ImuniSEL database, an offline vaccine registration platform by the Selangor state government.
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.
SELangkah app developer Dr Mohd Helmi Zakariah had earlier tweeted on May 21 a call for volunteers to register more than 5,000 elderly people for AstraZeneca’s jab. He maintained earlier today that the people registered with ImuniSEL had given consent for various vaccinations, saying: “The name was requested to us from CITF”.
