Another dropped ball?

It looks like another ball was dropped by the Duterte administration in its Covid response. All we have now is the term sheet, no signed supply agreement yet, according to Sen. Nancy Binay.

The Vaccine Czar, retired Gen. Carlito Galvez, didn’t know a law is needed to protect vaccine manufacturers from suits arising from problems with the vaccine.

Galvez said the absence of an indemnification program has delayed delivery of 117,000 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech shots allocated to the Philippines through the vaccine sharing platform COVAX facility.

The legal cover for the manufacturers is necessary because technically, the vaccines are still under emergency authority utilization. There is still no final regulatory clearance.

Duterte only asked Congress last week to pass the legislation protecting manufacturers and also the creation of an indemnity fund to cover costs of those who react badly to a vaccine shot.

We are not being singled out because of Dengvaxia, as some claim. British lawmakers changed the law to protect companies such as Pfizer, giving them immunity from lawsuits by patients in the event of any complications. This enabled Britain to roll out its coronavirus vaccine across the country last year.

The Economist reports that “on Feb. 14th the British government met its target to vaccinate 15 million people by the middle of the month. The campaign has started to show results, reducing cases, deaths and hospitalizations, but ministers remain cautious about lifting lockdown.”

Galvez admits being caught off-guard when Pfizer asked for a bilateral agreement on their indemnification clause. The Vaccine Czar should have known as early as October last year, from the UK experience, about the indemnity requirement.

Indeed, Congress could have included the budget for the indemnity fund in the national budget and passed necessary legislation that the vaccine manufacturers want.

Galvez is embarrassed by his failure. At least, he had the decency to apologize.

“Minsan, ako po’y nahihiya dahil sabi nga, bakuna na lang ang kulang. Nasaan na iyong bakuna? Iyon ang question po sa atin ngayon,” said Galvez.

“Bilang the leading person to procure and manage and get the best vaccine for all of us, nakita natin na talagang medyo nahuli tayo nang kaunti.”

“Sa awa po ng Diyos, siguro po tingnan po natin, baka po meron ding umabot na vaccine this February and majority of our vaccine, baka magdating po ng March,” Galvez said.

China’s donation of 600,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines should be arriving this week, Feb. 23, but cannot be shipped until an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration is granted. The FDA is not giving itself a deadline to deliver that, claiming they are still studying all the data.

Now Duterte says he is getting impatient over the lack of vaccines.

That’s the problem with a president who is not hands-on. Worse, Duterte has no management skills for anything more than running a provincial city. No wonder he is unable to discern similar lack of skills among his trusted officials.

Now it is panic time, specially because IATF and the economic managers are extremely eager to re-open the economy by bringing down quarantine impositions to the lowest levels. Having a good number of Filipinos vaccinated would have made such a decision easier to make.

But then again, how fast can the government vaccinate 100 million Filipinos?

According to Galvez, the government aims to vaccinate around 60 million to 70 million Filipinos in three to five years. Will the economy still be alive in five years?

“More or less 60 million to 70 million [people], we will do this in a 3- to 5-year period,” he said in a virtual press briefing last November 25.

That would be roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of the country’s 107 million population. The government is only capable of vaccinating 20 million to 30 million Filipinos a year, Galvez added.

Government’s “best case scenario” estimate that a vaccine will become locally available by April to June 2021. That means 60 percent of the population should have been vaccinated by 2024 to 2026.

But Galvez has a “worst case scenario,” which he also called as the “realistic scenario.” That calls for the government’s vaccine distribution starting late 2021 or early 2022. That doesn’t sound too encouraging.

Further delays in the vaccination drive will derail economic recovery after the country’s worst contraction on record last year, when it slumped 9.5 percent, the biggest decline in Southeast Asia. We have the region’s second highest number of coronavirus infections and deaths at 555,163 and 11,673, respectively.

Sen. Ralph Recto expressed our apprehensions best:

“The bureaucracy must always be faster than the virus, and nowhere is this speed more needed than in buying the one thing that could end it: vaccines.

“Sadly, Mr. President, we seem to be at the tail end of the vaccine race, overtaken by countries with fewer resources, when we with more resources and more cases should be getting more.

“They’re getting four million doses of AstraZeneca in Timbuktu, in Mali, in April, and I am not joking, Mr. President, as it is in the news. We can only watch in envy as planes unload vaccines from Myanmar to Harare.

“This prompted the joke that the government should have conducted contract-signing simulation before it held the vaccine-delivery drill.”

The guys in charge of our Covid response have obviously dropped another ball. Being late in our response is becoming a bad habit.

We were late in testing and isolation, too. Secretary Duque was not keen on testing at the start, possibly because we did not have enough test kits and facilities to process tests until much later.

Never mind Duque. Military guys should be good at logistics. Winning battles depends on supplies getting to the field soldiers on time. But maybe the logistics required in the civilian world is different.

IATF needs someone with experience in logistics operations of marketing and manufacturing firms… the guys who must make sure products or parts get to where they should be, just in time. Amateurs seem to be in charge now.

Well, we have an amateur at the helm of government. What could we expect?

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco