No plans to impose vaccine mandate on elderly: CE

Chief Executive Carrie Lam said on Sunday that she doesn’t plan to make Covid vaccinations mandatory for the elderly, while acknowledging it’s a huge challenge to get unjabbed senior citizens inoculated.

Speaking at her daily Covid briefing, Lam said around 70 percent of those aged 70 or above have been vaccinated, meaning about 280,000 elderly people have yet to receive their first jab.

She said the authorities are making an all-out effort to vaccinate all elderly people, adding that would impact Covid restrictions moving forward.

But the chief executive said she has no plans to impose a vaccine mandate on senior citizens.

“From the medical, moral and personal-choice points of view, vaccination should be administered only with consent,” she said.

“But we have seen… the low vaccination rate among the elderly resulting in a high mortality rate. So to protect the elderly… it seems we can require them to get jabbed more forcefully. But using the law to force every elderly person to get jabbed is a very hard decision. I’m not making that decision today and it’s not time for us to make that decision.”

Lam said she plans to give an interim review of social-distancing measures on Monday and explain how restrictions can be relaxed in phases.

But she made it clear the Covid situation in Hong Kong is still severe, with more people venturing out.

“From the sewage surveillance, we can see that there is a rebound. If you look at the mobility numbers on the basis of the Octopus cards, there is an increase in the mobility,” she explained.

“So I think we have to have regard to the development of the pandemic when we consider all these social-distancing measures.”

And she said even if the government is to lift a ban on flights from nine countries including Britain and the United States, arrivals would still need to fulfil “certain requirements”, without elaborating.