A senior citizen in Luyang getting appointment to have vaccination in Penang.
KOTA KINABALU: Science, Technology and Innovation Khairy Jamaluddin has been urged to immediately improve the MySejahtera and to ensure there would be no further errors, so as not to further reduce the people’s diminishing confidence in the mobile application and frustrate the country’s vaccination drive.
Democratic Action Party (DAP) Member of Parliament for Kota Kinabalu, Chan Foong Hin, said that he was disappointed to have received two complaints about errors in MySejahtera just before the harvest festival.
In the first case, a resident of Luyang, Kota Kinabalu, had his Covid-19 vaccination appointment fixed by MySejahtera miles up north in Kudat. The second case was worse still, involving another resident similarly residing in Luyang, Kota Kinabalu, but receiving a notice on the MySejahtera mobile application fixing his Covid-19 vaccination in Penang, way across the sea in Peninsular Malaysia.
Chan who is also Sabah DAP secretary, had brought up the two cases to Dr Christina Rundi, the director of the Sabah Health Department, and she promised to assist the complainants in changing the location of their vaccination centres.
“How can the MySejahtera mobile application which is said to have cost the people RM70 million suffer from such fundamental error? We in the DAP have been mobilizing our members to assist the people to register for Covid-19 vaccination through the MySejahtera and help the government speed up inoculation of the people, but I am sad to say that such an elementary error will certainly lead to lowering confidence in the application and frustrate the country’s Covid-19 vaccination drive,” said Chan.
In addition, Chan said that there are many elderly people and patients with comorbidities, and although they are listed as priority group in the second phase of the national Covid-19 vaccination plan, they are still left waiting for the notice for vaccination to come through the MySejahtera.
“I note that Datuk Masidi Manjun, the official spokesperson for the Sabah government on Covid-19, had declared earlier this year that Sabah’s vaccination plan was to commence on February 26 and will take up to a year to complete. The target number had been to vaccinate three million people in Sabah. On that basis, in Sabah alone an average of 250,000 people will have to be vaccinated every month, continuously for 12 months,” he said.
“However, as of May 31, a total of less than 150,000 people have been vaccinated in Sabah. How can we reach the target within a year?”
Chan further remarked that the error with MySejahtera is certainly not helping the vaccination drive in Sabah which had been moving at a snail’s pace.
Earlier, Khairy had pointed out that many people were assigned to other states for vaccination because of a problem with the Google Maps API utilised by MySejahtera.
Khairy said that the authorities will improve the registration system of the MySejahtera to allow users to confirm their state and postal code.
“How can we even hope to speed up the vaccination rate with the current working mode with errors here and there? I hereby sternly demand that Khairy improve the defects causing the error in the MySejahtera, and to ensure such error does not repeat itself,” said Chan.