Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for the Civil Service, Mrs Ingrid Yeung, at a media session after viewing the first-day operation of Private Clinic COVID-19 Vaccination Stations today (September 1):
Reporter: Secretary, many sports centres are vaccinating people. So, is there a reason to add private clinics to this scheme? And also, you mentioned that Sinovac is …… in private clinics, so why is there a sudden change to expand scale to BioNTech jabs as well?
Secretary for the Civil Service: We are using a lot of sports centres as Community Vaccination Centres. As you all know, these sports centres are built as sports centres and they do have a community function as sports centres. Moreover, some of them will need to be used by, for example, the Social Welfare Department to decant elders who are in residential homes with the virus spreading and elderlies who need to stay away from the homes for a definite period. We do need to deploy some of our sports centres for this use. That's why we believe it is an opportune time for us to add more vaccination centres for the community to facilitate members of the public to have their vaccines, to have their jabs done. As for adding the BioNTech to these private clinics, we've been using a few private clinics to test out the injection of BioNTech as it requires a dilution process. After having tested this for a long period, we find that the operators of these clinics are accustomed to this process, and are able to handle this process fairly safely. And we see that there are demands in the community for BioNTech vaccination, thus we have extended this BioNTech vaccination in private clinics to these 16 clinics that offer large-scale vaccination.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Follow this news feed: East Asia