Get second booster, urges well being ministry
Revealed on: Monday, January 02, 2023
By: FMT
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The well being minister says those that have acquired their first booster dose greater than six months in the past shouldn’t watch for the bivalent vaccines.
PETALING JAYA: Well being minister Dr Zaliha Mustafa has known as on the general public to get their second Covid-19 booster doses in gentle of the spike in Covid-19 circumstances in China.
“The well being ministry urges those that have acquired their first booster dose greater than six months in the past to get a second booster dose and never watch for the bivalent vaccine,” she stated in an announcement immediately.
“The prevailing monovalent vaccines are nonetheless very efficient in decreasing critical (Covid-19) signs and circumstances of demise.”
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She famous that solely 49.8% of Malaysians have acquired their first booster dose whereas 1.9% have acquired their second booster dose.
The Drug Management Authority has given conditional approval for the bivalent vaccine, which targets the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 along with the unique Covid-19 pressure, for people aged 12 years and older.
On Dec 29, well being director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah stated the nation’s inventory of Pfizer-BioNTech’s bivalent Covid-19 vaccines is predicted to reach by the tip of January, after it was initially presupposed to have arrived in November.
In the meantime, Zaliha stated the well being ministry will enhance efforts to include the unfold of Covid-19 on the nation’s borders, akin to tightening the SOPs for well being checks.
She stated that based mostly on info reported by China to the World Well being Group, “variants and subvariants present in China have additionally been detected in Malaysia”.
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FMT has reached out to the ministry for extra info on these variants and subvariants and the date they had been detected.
The newest Covid-19 variant – a subvariant of Omicron named BF.7 – is believed to be driving the surge in infections in China.
Information of the subvariant has prompted many nations, together with Malaysia, to impose temperature checks on travellers coming into the nation.
Final week, Zaliha additionally stated all these with a historical past of travelling to China inside 14 days of their arrival can be required to bear an RTK-Antigen check, and samples can be despatched for genome testing in the event that they had been discovered optimistic for Covid-19.
This additionally applies to those that have shut contact with people who’ve travelled to China inside the final 14 days or exhibit influenza-like sicknesses (ILI) or extreme acute respiratory an infection (SARI).
The ministry can even run PCR exams on sewage samples from plane arriving from China, which shall be despatched for genome sequencing if they’re discovered to be optimistic.
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