Tiong Trains Guns On Khairy Raises Questions On Vaccine Purchase

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Tiong King Sing wants Khairy Jamaluddin to disclose the number of vaccine doses the health ministry has purchased since he took over as the minister.PETALING JAYA: After his tirade against health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, Bintulu MP Tiong King Sing has now trained his guns on health minister Khairy Jamaluddin and raised questions over the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines.
The president of the Progressive Democratic Party asked the health minister for the number of vaccine doses that his ministry has purchased since he took over the post from his predecessor, Dr Adham Baba, in August.
“How much does it cost in total? What is the purchase price of each vaccine?” asked the prime minister’s special envoy to China in a statement today.
Tiong also clarified that he did not urge Khairy to imitate China’s zero Covid-19 strategy by implementing lockdowns, saying he had stated that such measures were not viable for Malaysia.

The government backbencher said he had simply urged the health minister to communicate with China more to adopt an appropriate and effective strategy to reduce Covid-19 mortality rates here.
“Khairy can stop being arrogant and conceited, let alone sidestep the fact that Noor Hisham is not doing great at all in fighting this pandemic.
“Since the outbreak of this pandemic, a total of 31,696 people have died unnecessarily. Compared to Malaysia’s 32 million population, shouldn’t this number worry us?” he asked.
Recently, Tiong questioned if Noor Hisham was the “best person” to lead the charge against the Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus, citing his alleged refusal to seek advice from China where the pandemic first began.
Khairy defended the health director-general, saying China’s Covid-19 strategy was “containment” or “zero Covid-19”, whereas Malaysia’s was mitigation as it could not afford a lockdown.
But Tiong today pointed out that Putrajaya had implemented several lockdowns in the past two years yet, unlike China, Malaysia saw its cases rise even more during that period.
“When Selangor had the highest number of Covid-19 cases due to large clusters in a number of glove factories, did Noor Hisham have any rapid response strategy to that?
“Besides helplessly letting those infections break out one after another, factories were told to close in stages, while human lives were at stake. In other countries, such negligence would have resulted in the minister and directors being forced to resign immediately,” he said. - FMT

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