The Health Ministry will today collate data on how many people have been administered with the COVID-19 AstraZeneca Vaccine since the programme began last Wednesday.

This will also include information on any reports of side-effects.

Permanent Secretary for Health, Dr James Fong says the Ministry should finish the administering of the first batch of 12, 000 doses among 6,000 frontline workers today.

Dr Fong says he will be meeting with the team that will provide an update on how the deployment of the vaccines went.

“We will be reviewing if there is any short comings in terms of deployment of the first dose and then we will start looking at taking mitigation actions to make sure we get our next dose in April and in May and we can reduce the amount of incidents of any variation in our deployment plan.”

Meanwhile, Dr Fong also highlighted that the side-effects of the vaccine reported are similar to what people around the world have experienced after inoculation.

“The reason you getting those side effects is because your body is building new proteins, new cells, new soldiers to fight COVID-19.”

Dr Fong says the side effects may last up to 72 hours or up to a week in some cases.