Continuous lockdowns are not sustainable on health, economic and educational grounds.
The only way to move forward in arresting the spread of Covid-19 is by achieving herd immunity, which is possible by speeding up the vaccination of the population. We need to vaccinate 80 per cent of the population to achieve herd immunity.
Malaysia has a population of 32.7 million; 23.5 per cent are between 0 and 14 years old and are not eligible for the vaccine. The remaining 76.5 per cent (24 million) must be vaccinated fast.
The 24 million exclude foreign and undocumented workers. To date, approximately 2.1 million (3.6 per cent) have been fully vaccinated.
We do face challenges in achieving the 80 per cent herd immunity. It depends on the availability of vaccines, manpower, vaccination centres and the populace's acceptance rate.
One of the best-performing countries in Covid-19 vaccination is the United States. About 41 per cent of its population have completed two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, with an average of 1.7 million doses administered daily.
This is driven by many factors, from improved execution to the public's increasing acceptance of the vaccine.
But there is one significant step that is likely a big contributor. The Biden administration started shipping vaccine doses directly to pharmacies.
The pilot began a few weeks ago with about 6,500 pharmacies distributing a million doses per week, rising to up to two million in the next phase. West Virginia boasts the most complete Covid-19 vaccination recorded so far.
It has used local pharmacies to deliver more vaccines than any other state. In the US, 36 states permit vaccine administration by pharmacists as part of the scope of pharmacy practice.
The American College of Physicians and the American Society of Internal Medicine support pharmacists as sources of immunisation information, hosts of immunisation sites and immunisers.
In the United Kingdom, more than 1.7 million Covid-19 vaccines have been administered at community pharmacies.
In Australia, pharmacies began to vaccinate in mid-2021, and the vaccination will be extended to groups of the general population.
In France, the government will engage all health professionals, including pharmacists, in mass vaccinations.
In Italy, Lombardy is the latest region to agree that pharmacists should be able to carry out Covid-19 vaccinations, joining the Piedmont region, which began vaccinations in January this year.
Closer to home, pharmacists in the Philippines, under the umbrella of the Philippine National Deployment and Vaccination Plan for Covid-19 Vaccines, started administering vaccines in February.
In Portugal, the involvement of pharmacies is being explored to increase vaccination capacity, as reported by task force coordinator Vice-Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo. A similar stance is being examined in Japan.
In Malaysia, the coordinating minister of the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (NIP) stated on June 1 that the nation would receive 12 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine by the end of July, while 25 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are expected to arrive in the third quarter of this year.
The minister has targeted to administer 200,000 doses daily by July. We are mulling over more vaccination centres, including 1,000 private general practitioner clinics.
Former deputy health minister Dr Lee Boon Chye proposed that we target 300,000 Covid-19-vaccine injections per day to achieve the 80 per cent immunisation rate by year end.
Currently, we have about 5,000 community pharmacists serving in 3,200 community pharmacies, as well as 21,000 active registered pharmacists who are willing to help in speeding up the vaccination process.
We urge the relevant authorities to seriously consider including pharmacists as team members in the NIP.
We may be able to hasten the vaccination for the already-registered-and-waiting public. With herd immunity, we can arrest the pandemic and hopefully return to our "old" normal.
The writer is dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology University, Malaysia