Govt To Deploy Mobile Vaccination Vehicle Soon

The civil service chief, Patrick Nip, said on Saturday that the government will deploy its first mobile vaccination vehicle in public housing estates from next week, to lift the vaccination rate, particularly among the elderly. However, he also said some community vaccination centres would close.

Speaking during a Commercial Radio programme, Nip, who's in charge of the city's vaccination drive, said the vehicle will initially be parked at Sun Chui Estate in Sha Tin on Friday, then Lok Wah South Estate in Kwun Tong on next Sunday, before moving on to schools.

"[The vehicle] will be parked at a housing estate for two days, to make it more convenient for elderly residents to get vaccinated," he said.

Meanwhile, he said 11 of the current 21 community vaccination centres will stop operations at the end of next month.

Of the ten centres which will remain open, three will provide the Sinovac jab, and seven the BioNTech one, he said.

"The ten centres will still be able to meet demand, because currently the capacity of our 21 centres is far greater than the number of jabs being given daily, so it's a bit of a waste of resources."

The minister also said two more public hospitals would offer inoculation services from early December, apart from the nine already doing so.

He said he believed that the vaccine take-up would increase after teenagers aged between 12 and 17 were allowed to get the Sinovac jab next week, adding that Hong Kong needed an 80 percent inoculation rate to resume quarantine-free travel with the mainland and other places.

He said the authorities were also looking into rolling out the "vaccine passport" to differentiate jabbed and unjabbed people at public places like restaurants, saying many places around the world had adopted the policy to offer better protection to the people.

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