The DAP’s Luyang representative Phoong Jin Zhe, at the same time, called on the people to give Pakatan Harapan an opportunity to lead the country in the war against the pandemic.
“This is to give Malaysia a chance to break through (the pandemic) with a new line-up of leadership,” he said in a statement here today.
“It is urgent that we have a ‘War Cabinet’, a concept by former British prime minister Winston Churchill during World War II, because our nation is now at war with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Since we have already declared a state of Emergency, it is time we treat this pandemic like war. Malaysia deserves a new, courageous and skilled leadership to combat this pandemic.”
Phoong, who is also the DAP Youth national publicity secretary, said that despite a movement control order (MCO) and the declaration of Emergency last January, cases had continued to surge instead of reducing and that the government had failed Malaysians.
Yesterday’s 6,075 new Covid-19 cases showed that the pandemic was getting out of control, he said, and without appropriate measures to tackle it, Malaysia might face a Covid-19 tsunami similar to that of India. Malaysia reported 6,806 cases today.
He said: “This government did not only fail to contain the pandemic but is also performing poorly on our only hope of ending this pandemic – the vaccination programme.”
He said it was not an exaggeration to take India as an example as the country had, in February, recorded an average of 9,000 cases daily but this rose to 300,000 cases per day in three months.
“According to statistics, total cases divided by overall population shows that India would have 18,317 cases per million people.”
Saying that Malaysia had recorded 14,648 cases per million people, he noted that India’s population, however, was 43 times more compared with Malaysia’s.
“This shows that our situation is not optimistic,” Phoong said.
He added that, according to data, up to May 17, only 1.23 million Malaysians had taken their first vaccine jab, with only 760,000 Malaysians being fully inoculated.
He said the national vaccination programme had been in place for three months and 42% of the population had already registered.
“However, only approximately 6% of our population took the first jab. The government must give the public an explanation for the delay.
“The 2021 budget allocated RM3 billion to purchase vaccines and the government even utilised billions from the National Trust Fund. These were all approved without going through Parliament.”
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