‘Vaccination pace to pick up by Q2’

MANILA, Philippines — The government has vowed to speed up the pace of immunization against COVID-19 upon the arrival of more doses by the middle of the second quarter of this year.

In a joint statement, the Department of Health (DOH) and the National Task Force against COVID-19 (NTF) assured the public that the pace at which healthcare workers (HCWs) are prioritized for inoculation would not be the pace once the National COVID-19 Vaccination Program (NVP) is implemented at full scale.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the vaccination of HCWs is being done in batches to ensure that hospitals are fully operational and their hospital staff sufficient at any given time.

“In anticipation of local and systemic reactions that can occur as a result of vaccination and may render some vaccinees unable to report to work, hospitals needed to spread out the vaccination of their staff,” Duque said.

Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez maintained that the government immunization program is on track and the target of inoculating 70 percent of the country’s population will be reached within the year.

“To date, almost 90 percent of the vaccines we have on hand have already been deployed within the past two weeks. They have already been dispatched to far-flung areas such as Batanes in northern Luzon, and to the southernmost island province of Tawi-tawi in Mindanao,” he said in a statement.

“As much as we would like to conduct a full-scale vaccination program, we are however constrained by the current limited supply of vaccines in the world market. And this is the same problem being faced by most nations around the world,” Galvez said.

In dismissing what he described as “false” reports on a slow implementation of the NVP, Galvez said: “To put things into proper perspective, the initial vaccine roll-out is still limited to our medical frontliners and health care workers and not yet for the general public.”

He said the inoculation of medical workers must be prioritized considering their risk and the vaccination must be done in batches, as explained by Duque.

When all the medical frontliners and health care workers are inoculated, he said the vaccination pace will pick up since the country already has sufficient vaccine supplies by then.

At this time, Galvez said, the current production capacity of vaccine manufacturers simply has not been able to keep up with global demand and that most of the anti-COVID vaccines produced have already been pre-ordered already by rich countries.

“It is not logical to compute performance evaluation from the start of the mini-rollout. We will be able to get our benchmark vaccination rate when we start our massive community roll out by May and June,” he said.

He said the initial rollout of COVID-19 vaccines to HCWs is just the preparatory phase of the full-scale vaccination program and lessons learned from this phase will be beneficial once vaccination has been ramped up to cover the rest of the priority populations.

Galvez said the bulk of the vaccine supplies is expected to start arriving by the second quarter of this year.

He further belied the allegation that the country has borrowed over P10 trillion pesos to support its vaccination program.

Citing a report from the Department of Finance (DOF), Galvez said the government is working on an overall budget of P82.5 billion for the national vaccination program, of which P62 billion in financing is sourced from our development partners and the rest is financed internally.

He said all copies of the loan and grant agreements signed by the DOF are uploaded on the agency’s website and can be viewed by anyone who wishes to check their veracity.

The government, he said, has been relentless in acquiring vaccines to ensure that the country will have a fair share of the doses.

He said inoculating one million Filipinos is only the beginning of our aggressive and sustained campaign to achieve herd immunity and finally put an end to the pandemic.

Galvez recently flew to India to broker agreements with the Serum Institute of India for vaccine supplies. He said another team would be flying to Russia to look into Gamaleya’s Sputnik V vaccine.

Vaccine tracker

Meanwhile, Sen. Risa Hontiveros urged the NTF and the DOH to set up a vaccine tracker immediately so the public can view the progress of the NVP amid the country’s contracting of another $900 million loan for vaccines.

“Filipinos will pay for those loans. A vaccine tracker updated daily and accurately will be especially important when we start receiving the vaccines we paid for,” Hontiveros said in a statement.

She said the proposed vaccine tracker can double as a “money trail” to allow the public to find out where the billions of pesos in loans are going.

Hontiveros lamented that Filipinos have been mostly left in the dark in the past two weeks as the vaccination program was launched, with little public data on how many health workers have been vaccinated.

“The vaccine tracker will be an important tool to regain trust among the public. Aside from being able to clearly see where we are or the progress of vaccination, this could show that the NTF is committed to transparency and accountability throughout the whole process,” Hontiveros said.

Go: Trust gov’t program

For his part, Sen. Bong Go urged Filipinos to trust in the government’s vaccination program and urged everyone qualified to have themselves inoculated.

He gave assurances that the vaccines approved for use by the government went through a rigorous evaluation process to ascertain their safety and efficacy.

“Trust in the vaccines. Don’t be afraid of vaccines. Be afraid of COVID-19. If there’s no vaccines, we’ll have difficulty in surviving this pandemic,” Go said in an interview after his visit and distribution of assistance to market vendors, persons with disabilities, fisherfolks and fire victims in Dumaguete City on Thursday.

Vouching for the efficacy and safety of Sinovac vaccines from China, the senator reiterated that he and President Duterte are willing to be inoculated in public to demonstrate their confidence in the vaccines.

PNP inoculation

Meanwhile, the Philippine National Police (PNP) said it would be rolling out 700 AstraZeneca doses today after securing them over the weekend.

PNP officer-in-charge Lt. Gen. Guillermo Eleazar said the PNP had also secured the second doses for 1,196 PNP health workers who were vaccinated with CoronaVac in the first week of March.

More than 80 percent of the 219,000 PNP personnel signified their intention to be inoculated.

As the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew hours begin today in Metro Manila, the PNP has deployed an additional 9,634 policemen to enforce public compliance, setting up 373 checkpoints throughout the region.

Bayan scores ‘militarized’ approach

Yesterday, activist group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) called for an overhauling of the government’s response to the pandemic, describing the Duterte administration’s “militarized” approach a complete failure.

“Militarized enforcement of quarantine protocols has failed. Duterte himself must be made answerable for the disastrous effects of the lockdown,” Bayan secretary general Renato Reyes said.

“One year is enough to conclude that our pandemic response needs to be overhauled,” said Reyes, adding that Health Secretary Francisco Duque and “the generals” in-charge of the government’s COVID-19 response “must go.”

Bayan’s statement, issued on the eve of the first anniversary of the pandemic lockdowns, also paid tribute to “all brave frontliners who continue to battle COVID-19” and fallen frontliners “who made the ultimate sacrifice in the performance of their duty to the public.”

However, it slammed the government for allegedly failing to address not only the health but also the social and economic aspects of the pandemic.

“We have remained under quarantine for a year, one of the longest in the world. COVID cases are on the rise and curfews have been restored. The government’s militarized pandemic response can only be described as a failure,” Reyes said. – Neil Jayson Servallos, Paolo Romero, Elizabeth Marcelo