KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 — Some individuals received appointments for the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine without booking these as a Selangor government application made these on their behalf, the Covid-19 Immunisation Task Force (CITF) said today.
The CITF was responding to complaints that some people have had their previous appointments for other vaccines superseded by new ones for AstraZeneca that was previously only available through an opt-in scheme.
The government task force said its checks showed that some appointments for the AstraZeneca vaccine were made without the knowledge or consent of the eventual recipient.
“The CITF found that mass bookings were made from the same IP address. The CITF contacted one of the parties who made the bookings, which was SELangkah,” it said in a statement.
“SELangkah also informed us that they made the bookings for the AstraZeneca slots without checking if the individual from the ImuniSEL database agreed to receive the vaccine, which meant their previous appointments, if any, were superseded.”
The CITF said it was working with SELangkah and others involved to resolve the issues as best possible.
On Twitter, one of the developers behind SELangkah appeared to respond to the CITF’s assertion by saying that the appointment mix-ups could have been avoided through a basic date validation function.
“All the drama because they forgot to insert a line of code: IF Date B > Date A: Date A. Else: Date B.
“What to do, scapegoat is needed,” Dr Helmi Zakaria wrote without making any reference to either the CITF or the AstraZeneca registration.
SELangkah is the Selangor government’s own Covid-19 registration app that was launched around the same time as the MySejahtera that has become mandatory.
The CITF did not explain the mechanism through which SELangkah was able to make mass bookings at a time when Malaysians had struggled to access the CITF website to register for the opt-in AstraZeneca scheme.
After the initial furore over the inability to register for the AstraZeneca vaccine, some are now complaining that they have been given appointments to receive it when they did not register for it themselves.
Others also complained that their previous appointments, some as early as this week, have now been pushed back to June and July for the vaccine they did not ask to receive.
The CITF has reincorporated the AstraZeneca vaccine into the main National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme after concluding that there was no longer hesitancy towards it.
