MoH: Mandatory Quarantine Will Still Be Enforced Even For The Vaccinated

Ministry of Health, Director-General, Dr. Noor Hisham.

Ministry of Health’s (MoH) Director-General, Dr. Noor Hisham Abdullah has highlighted that vaccinated travellers are not exempted from complying with the prescribed Covid-19 infection prevention measures which includes mandatory quarantine.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has not recommended vaccination certificates to be used as a ‘immunity passport’ for travel purposes.

In a commentary by the Head of Science and Technology at EMIR Research, Ameen Kamal has highlighted that health passport carriers may still be vulnerable to infections and severe symptoms from emerging Covid-19 strains, further complicating the validity of health passports.

“MoH has decided that risk assessments should be carried out on travellers who have received complete Covid-19 immunisation.

Although countries with access to Covid-19 vaccines had begun inoculating their citizens since the end of 2020, more information was required to determine its effectiveness,” Dr. Noor Hisham added.

According to the United States’ (US) Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Covid-19 vaccine is effective at preventing the disease, especially severe illness and death. However, early data show the vaccines may work against some variants but could be less effective against others.

A study conducted bioRxiv has shown that the South African variant of the virus, 501Y.V2, can evade the antibodies provided by some coronavirus treatments.

“Furthermore, the 501Y.V2 shows substantial or complete escape from neutralising antibodies in Covid-19 convalescent plasma. It is also highlighted that the prospect of reinfections to occur and may foreshadow a reduced efficacy of the current Covid-19 vaccines,” South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases wrote.

On the other hand, the Immunitee Health Passport became Malaysia’s first health passport to be accepted into Singapore through a partnership with Temasek-founded Affinidi in early February.

The health passport is designed to store personal immunisation records and vaccine data with the Unifier platform providing interoperability to securely share the necessary data with the various national health check systems being put in place globally.

“We believe health passports will become just as important as a normal travel document, to ensure that travellers comply with both Covid-19 testing and vaccination protocols. This will allow travel bubbles to open up faster and life to return to some form of normality,” Dr. Nick Boden, Immunitee‘s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) told BusinessToday.

Dr. Noor Hisham has said that the MoH will continue to monitor the development of Covid-19 infections within and outside the country, whereby screening for the disease among travellers from abroad will be continued at all Malaysian International Gateways.

On March 8, the Coordinating Minister for Covid-19 Immunisation, Khairy Jamaluddin has also emphasised that individuals who travel overseas in between their first and second Covid-19 vaccine will still be subjected to mandatory quarantine upon their return.

Based on monitoring carried out by Malaysia’s National Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre, there are 27 Covid-19 clusters involving index cases who arrived from abroad, with 2,019 positive cases reported between March 4, 2020 and March 26, 2021

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