MANILA, Philippines — The Northern Samar Provincial Board (PB) started investigating last Friday allegations that 15 Sinovac doses were taken from the provincial vaccination center last month and brought to a private house in the capital town of Catarman.
The allegations state that on June 10, 15 doses of Sinovac were taken out of the Northern Samar Provincial Hospital (NSPH), which houses the provincial vaccination center, and were allegedly brought to the house of an unnamed politician in the province.
Maryjane Morales of the provincial vaccination team testified at the Northern Samar PB that 50 doses were scheduled for vaccination that day, 35 of which were administered to listed recipients in the morning.
The 15 doses that were supposed to be given in the afternoon were, however, not administered allegedly because of non-appearance of the recipients. “There were no more people to receive the vaccination,” said Morales.
Morales said that she and the vaccination personnel later turned over the unused vaccines to Dr. Catherine Miral, who was alone at the vaccination facility. They said they no longer knew what happened to the doses after the turnover that day.
Some witnesses said that later that afternoon, a woman in white hospital scrubs emerged from the NSPH hand-carrying a blue cooler box that she quickly loaded onto a waiting white vehicle, which some said allegedly proceeded to the house of the politician.
An insider said the people in the politician’s house, including the security escorts, were immediately vaccinated.
The informant said that the incident happened while Dr. Ninfa Caparoso-Kam, chief of NSPH and concurrent head of the Provincial Health Office (PHO), was in the United States.
In a regular board session earlier on June 30, member Mary Ann Abalon delivered a privilege speech denouncing and calling for an investigation into the alleged “illegal removal and transport of several COVID-19 vaccines from the provincial storage facility to a private place in the province.”
The board subsequently constituted itself into a committee of the whole for the primary purpose of investigating the incident. Some members said they were interested to find out if Miral really took out the doses from the vaccination center, while others wanted to determine the veracity of the report that these doses were brought to the politician’s house.
Miral, however, was not present on the first day of the provincial board hearing, but in a phone interview bluntly said that she is the chairman ofvaccine operations in the province, and that she could not talk about the issue because she would be testifying at the PB hearings anyway.
Kam has already returned from the US and talked to the media after the PB hearing. She neither confirmed nor denied if Miral is the chair of the provincial vaccination center, but some sources alleged that Miral has been very close to a certain political family in the province.
Kam said Gov. Edwin Ongchuan had issued an executive order creating an investigating body, as a hearing committee of the PHO, to dig deeper into the matter.
“Personally, I was disappointed with this unfortunate incident because we exerted much effort to make this vaccination program in the province successful, but then this happened,” said Kam.
“There’s somewhat a breach of protocol here. Miral will be asked to explain the incident to the committee,” she added.
A private lawyer, who asked not to be named, said the principal person in the incident may be liable for malversation of public property, because he or she allowed or effected the misappropriation of a government property – the vaccines – under his or her custody.
Besides, there is no ruling in the vaccination rollout that vaccination can be done in a private setting, he said.