KUALA LUMPUR, July 12 — Malaysia recorded the fourth highest Covid-19 vaccination rate in the world by inoculating 7.3 per cent of its population in the past seven days, said Our World In Data.
Edouard Mathieu — head of data at Our World In Data, a global data repository that tracks Covid-19 cases and vaccination across the world, among others — tweeted today the nations that administered the most Covid-19 shots globally in the last week: Canada (9 per cent of the population), Ireland (7.9 per cent), Denmark (7.4 per cent), Malaysia (7.3 per cent), Dominican Republic (7 per cent), Ecuador (6.6 per cent), Italy (6.2 per cent), Uruguay (6.1 per cent), and Turkey (5.8 per cent).
According to Our World In Data, based on rolling seven-day averages, Malaysia administered 1.04 vaccine doses per 100 people yesterday.
Malaysia reached its target of more than 300,000 daily shots-to-the-arm, initially set for August, the past week since July 5 every day, except for yesterday that saw 291,217 people vaccinated. The highest-ever daily vaccination record was set on July 8 with 376,909 jabs. Malaysia is expected to receive some 14.4 million vaccine doses this month.
Covid-19 vaccination rates in the United Kingdom and the United States have been declining since late May and mid-April respectively, as the majority of the populations in both nations have already been vaccinated.
As of July 11, about 68 per cent of UK’s population have been inoculated, including 51 per cent fully vaccinated, whereas 55 per cent of the American population has received Covid-19 vaccines, including 48 per cent fully inoculated, according to Our World In Data.
Flush with vaccine supply, the UK and the US were able to roll out mass vaccination campaigns before the highly transmissible Delta variant became the dominant strain in their countries.
The Guardian reported that based on figures from Duke Global Health Innovation Center as of January 25, the UK ordered 367 million vaccine doses, more than five times its population, while the US purchased 1.2 billion doses (3.7 doses per person) and the European Union (EU) procured 1.6 billion doses (3.5 doses per person). Covid-19 vaccine orders by the EU and the US were the highest globally.
Malaysia’s Covid-19 vaccination programme is working overdrive to outpace the virus, as Klang Valley’s health care system appears to have collapsed, based on anecdotal accounts from frontline medical workers who are now comparing the crisis in Malaysia’s most developed region to coronavirus surges in Italy early last year and in India a few months ago.
As of yesterday, while Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur reported the top and fifth highest complete vaccination rates in the country among their adult population at 47.7 per cent and 26.6 per cent respectively, Selangor came in last at 10.5 per cent.
