“As Umno heads towards a showdown with Perikatan Nasional, with a good chance that Umno will remain a key partner in a future coalition government, Khairy has everything to gain by looking like one of the few competent and reliable ministers in the government,” said political scientist Wong Chin Huat, who described the science minister as having matured from “arrogance” as a youth leader to “a steady and patient player who does a good job while waiting for his chance”.

“Depending on the composition of the next government, he may stand a good chance to be a senior minister and even a candidate for prime minister one day,” Wong said.

Meanwhile, he said the current administration’s loss of middle-ground voters – ordinary people who view political parties and politicians with indifference – due to its “incompetence and chaos” in managing the pandemic and economy, as well as the impunity and arrogance of leaders flouting Covid-19 restrictions, might be reclaimed a successful vaccination roll-out.

“However, Perikatan Nasional may emerge as its own worst enemy. Because of its fragile parliamentary majority, this government dares not mete out punishment for its allies who break rules or misbehave … Just one scandal may bury this government,” Wong said.

The fact that the science minister – as opposed to the health minister or Prime Minister Muhyiddin himself – was placed in charge of the vaccination roll-out might have been part of a grander scheme to woo Umno, political analyst James Chin said.

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“If the vaccination plans go smoothly, then Muhyiddin will be able to justify his measures such as the second national lockdown and the announcement of an emergency this year, which earned him disapproval,” he said. “But there’s a long way to go, it isn’t such a smooth journey.”

Malaysia began negotiating with vaccine manufacturers in April 2020, when most were in the middle of Phase I and II clinical trials, with the government from the outset adopting the strategy of building a portfolio of vaccines from different producers.

“[This was] a great strategy to hedge our bets to increase our chances of having access to at least one successful vaccine candidate, and also to ensure we can have as many doses as we need so we can achieve vaccine-induced herd immunity,” said public health analyst Nazihah Noor of Khazanah Research Institute.

Its goal is to vaccinate 27 million of its population of 33 million by the first quarter of 2022. The plan also includes vaccinating members of Malaysia’s foreign worker community, which numbers about 4 million – although a recent deportation exercise carried out by the governments of Malaysia and Myanmar has raised concerns about spooking the population of foreign national population, with a negative effect on vaccine uptake.

“The deportation exercise will spook migrant workers and cause them to go to ground out of fear of being repatriated. Workers in sectors such as construction or [hospitality] may report for work as normal, but avoid presenting themselves for vaccination and instead flee the authorities,” lawyer Mahajoth Singh said. “If the government is serious about addressing the pandemic holistically, it cannot run the risk of having migrant workers avoid this essential measure.”

Malaysia’s voluntary vaccination programme will be rolled out in three stages. The first, from February to April, involves 300,000 medical and 200,000 non-medical frontline workers such as politicians, security and welfare officers; the second involves at-risk groups such as the infirm and elderly; and the final phase is for Malaysian adults.

“Our first objective is to protect those who are most vulnerable,” said Khairy in a statement last month, in which he also lamented that developed countries had “paid a lot to corner the [vaccine] market even before the availability of safety and efficacy data”. Besides this buying power, neighbours such as Indonesia received vaccines earlier in exchange for taking part in clinical trials last year – Malaysia was not selected at the time due to its low number of cases, which only shot up in September.

Besides confronting vaccine hesitancy and public misinformation, Khairy has also pushed the #LindungiDiriLindungiSemua (Protect Yourself, Protect Everyone) campaign, which makes the case that inoculating yourself is a civic duty. He said the move to vaccinate politicians – which he pointed out was necessary to allay public concerns and boost trust – would be done in stages, although experts have expressed some reservations about extending the measures to all members of parliament in the first phase.

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“While there may be a compelling enough case for prioritising some leaders of the government, I haven’t yet encountered a sufficiently compelling justification for vaccinating all MPs, for instance,” said Nazihah from Khazanah Research Institute.

“Some might say that MPs should be prioritised because they are out seeing people a lot so they are also at higher risk of getting infected, but if the reason they are at higher risk of infection is because they are not strictly following rules like wearing masks and physical distancing, I don’t think we should reward bad behaviour by vaccinating them first, especially as those who are vaccinated still need to follow the rules for a while.”

Political analyst Chin said that while the vaccination plan was rolled out, coalition politics would continue to be tumultuous behind closed doors. He noted that this was largely due to the struggle over who should lead the country between Umno warlords and Muhyiddin, who was part of the party before being turfed out in 2016 and helping set up the nationalist Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia.

“One mountain cannot have two tigers,” Chin said.