Unlike the government’s successful rollout of Covid-19 vaccines just months ago, the reception for its booster programme that started in October has been lukewarm.

As many of 40 percent of people who received an appointment for a booster shot failed to turn up, according to Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin.

When the Health Ministry held a lengthy press conference on Nov 12 touting the superior effectiveness of heterologous boosters using Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, it did not however attempt to allay public concerns regarding safety of this mix-and-match strategy.

Against this backdrop, Universiti Malaya epidemiology professor Dr Moy Foong Ming lamented that misinformation regarding the safety of heterologous boosters have festered online...