The PN Government Is Blaming Everyone Except Themselves For The Botched National Immunisation Programme(PICK), The Gross Mismanagement Of The COVID-19 Pandemic And The Economic Crisis.
The PN Government is blaming everyone except themselves for the botched PICK, the gross mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis. Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein has urged PN to learn from its mistakes in the battle against Covid-19, criticising the bureaucracy within the government as a “key barrier” to both the country’s vaccination efforts and accepting much-needed international assistance and cooperation.
Hishammudin cited three suggestions, namely consistent application of Movement Control Order(MCO) SOPs, expediting the approval of vaccines and swift rollout of PICK and mass testing. These suggestions are nothing new and have been stated repeatedly by PH previously to no avail.
Continuously blaming the people and now the bureaucracy is shameful. Hishammudin should boldly admit that double-standards in enforcement between VIPs and the ordinary rakyat as well as repeated U-turns in the compliance of MCO’s SOPs have resulted in record daily infections and death toll. The policy flip-flops between Ministries on the economy and which business can or cannot operate during the MCO total lockdown is devastating to businesses. And now the civil service is being made the scapegoat for the snail-pace approval of vaccines and slow rollout of PICK, when it is the government leaders that failed to procure the vaccines early resulting in delivery delays.
If this is the best a senior Minister can do, then there is every reason for the public loss of confidence and trust deficit.
Increasing the number of PPVs will help bring vaccines closer to the people, especially in the rural areas.
Without increasing the number of PPVs by another 2,000, it will be challenging to achieve the government’s own target of 150,000 daily doses in June, 200,000 daily doses in July and 300,000 daily doses in August. Currently, 124,618, 133,804, and 128,912 Covid-19 vaccine doses were administered throughout the nation on June 11, 12, and 13 respectively below the targeted 150,000 daily doses.
How can the target of 300,000 daily doses by August be achieved with only 381 PPVs, especially those living far away from the PPVs? Malaysia can only achieve herd immunity of 80% of the population by bringing vaccines to the people and not the other way round.
Unless the PN government admits where they went wrong, they will never be able to correct its faults, reset and take the correct path to overcome the COVID-19 and economic crisis.
Lim Guan Eng
DAP Secretary-General
