HEALTH Minister Khairy Jamaluddin should be learning and applying effective methods used by other nations successful in containing their COVID-19 cases, said Sungai Pelek state assemblyman Ronnie Liu.
“Nobody said Malaysia should copy and paste everything done in China. However, there are many things we could have applied here, which we didn’t before such as imposing targeted lockdowns and improving our tracing and tracking capabilities,” he told FocusM.
Yesterday, Bintulu MP Tiong King Sing criticised Khairy over his COVID-19 management policy, asking whether the latter had a clear strategy to meet “worst-case scenarios” or still adopting a “one step at a time” attitude.
He noted that US, UK, France, Spain and other countries were facing the might of Omicron, with hospitalisations having doubled and national medical systems being overstretched.
“Now is not the time to display some kind of personal ‘political wisdom’. To deal with this imminent global health threat, we need to enter a state of preparation quickly, instead of waiting for the medical system to collapse first and listening to a Health Ministry (MOH) press conference,” Malaysiakini reported Tiong as saying.
The Special Envoy to China also doubled down on his criticism against Health Ministry director general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, questioning whether he was the right man to deal with the pandemic given he is a surgeon, not an infectious disease expert.
“The fact remains that he is a surgeon, whose background is not of a public health speciality. They are obviously underqualified but still refuse to seek advice from China, which has massive experience in fighting this pandemic,” Tiong charged.
However, Khairy defended himself and Noor Hisham saying that while China’s methods are successful, it involved “zero-COVID-19 strategy” even if there are only three cases detected.
“Malaysia cannot afford to adopt such strategy due to economic and other issues. Therefore, we adopted the mitigation strategy.
“It means we increase vaccinations, adhere to standard operating procedures (SOPs) and improve in TRIIS (test, report, inform, isolate and seek),” the Rembau MP said on Twitter.
Double standards, vaccine purchase details
Touching on the matter, Liu backed Tiong’s statement saying that the MOH could surely improve on many areas involving COVID-19 mitigation such as increase testing among the population.
He added that the MOH could have also used the expertise from other countries to include alternative medicine to complement modern medicine in treating COVID-19 cases.
“We could have improved our apps and information channels. The Government could have increased beds and facility to cater for new infection cases.
“We could have also hired more doctors, nurses and paramedics, in addition to continue using private healthcare facilities such as private clinics to improve our response,” Liu stated.
The DAP leader added that one of the glaring problems seen by the public was on the lack of transparency in the purchase of vaccines and double standards applied when it comes to VVIPs breaching SOP.
“All we want from Khairy and Noor Hisham for the Government to implement all the good practices used not only in China but other countries too,” he reiterated. – Jan 10, 2022
