Sabah has no plans to give ICs, citizenship to vaccinated migrants without documents, says CM

The Sabah government has no plans to issue identity cards (ICs) or citizenship to undocumented immigrants who have received Covid-19 jabs in the state, the state assembly was told today.

Chief Minister Hajiji Noor said this was to protect the rights and interests of the people of Sabah.

“However, the state government will consider (issuing ICs and citizenship) to the natives of the state who still do not have identification documents,” he added.

He said this in response to a supplementary question from Ewon Benedick (Upko-Kedamaian) on the matter.

Recently, the media reported Deputy Home Minister Ismail Mohamed Said as saying that the ministry would consider giving ICs or citizenship cards to Covid-19 vaccine recipients in Sarawak and Sabah who do not have identification documents, including the natives, if they meet the conditions.

Meanwhile, state Community Development and People’s Welfare Minister Shahelmey Yahya, to another question from Ewon, said Sabah had received more than five million doses of Covid-19 vaccine since the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) was implemented.

Shahelmey, who is also the operations director of the State Immunisation Programme, said the vaccines comprised 3.38 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac (1.28 million doses), AstraZeneca (189,990 doses) and CanSino (180,000 doses).

“We will be getting an additional 2.89 million doses of the vaccine supply in September,” he said, adding that the amount would be sufficient to cover the vaccination needs of the state’s population who have yet to receive the vaccine.

He said as of Sept 21, 59.4% of the adult population had been fully vaccinated while 33.8% of adolescents in the state had received a first dose of vaccine.

On the vaccination programme for residents in the rural areas, he said a total of 733 vaccination outreach programmes had been implemented with 358,284 people vaccinated.