More Pfizer doses arrive, boost daily target

CEBU, Philippines — The country has received more Pfizer coronavirus vaccines to boost the national government’s daily vaccination target, including the pediatric population.

Last Friday night, the country got 866,970 doses of Pfizer vaccines.

The latest shipment represented the first batch out of 1,733,940 Pfizer doses procured by the national government.

The remaining 866,970 doses were also expected to arrive last night.

So far, the country has already received over 31 million doses of Pfizer vaccines. More than half were procured by the national government, and the rest were donated by the U.S. government via the World Health Organization-led COVAX facility.

Pfizer is the second most widely used vaccine in the country.

More Pfizer vaccines are expected as it is only one of the two vaccine brands that have an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for minors ages 12 to 17 years old. The other one is Moderna.

So far, the Philippines already got a total of 109,779,530 doses of vaccines against Covid-19.

The National Task Force against Covid-19 hopes to sustain the 1 million per day jabs nationwide it got last November 4. Its target is 1to 1.5 million doses daily.

The Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) has urged LGUs to ramp up their efforts in the vaccination as they continue to aim for the 70% of the country’s population to be inoculated by the end of this year. — JMD (FREEMAN)