Leading by example

Let’s see… Secretary to the Cabinet Karlo Nograles says he is willing to be vaccinated in public with China’s Sinovac shot.

Nograles, who is also co-chair of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases, says vaccine czar Carlito Galvez is also willing to do the same – as long as the Sinovac jab gets emergency use authorization from our country’s Food and Drug Administration.

The two key officials in the pandemic response have discussed this, Nograles told us on “The Chiefs” last Tuesday on Cignal TV’s OneNews. They acknowledge the importance of role models in overcoming Filipinos’ aversion specifically to COVID vaccines made in China.

This aversion is on top of the vaccine hesitancy arising from the Dengvaxia hysteria in our country.

The resistance to Chinese vaccines, which tracks Filipinos’ below-zero trust of China that is consistently reflected in surveys, can seriously derail the government’s COVID inoculation program.

Thanks to the COVAX facility put together by the World Health Organization (WHO), it looks like the first jabs to reach the Philippines this month won’t be Sinovac after all, but will be the Rolls Royce of the vaccines, made by Pfizer / BioNTech.

WHO country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe announced yesterday that the Philippines has been allocated 44 million doses under COVAX, mostly from Pfizer and AstraZeneca / Oxford U, with 9.2 million expected to arrive within the first half of the year. An initial 117,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine will arrive within a week or two.

Our total allocation will be good for 22 million people – not enough to meet the 70 percent coverage for herd immunity. Unless President Duterte can secure from his friend Vladimir Putin a large amount of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, now peer-reviewed to be 91.6 percent effective, it looks like the bulk of the COVID jabs to be administered nationwide will still be the ones developed by Sinovac and possibly by Chinese state-owned Sinopharm. These vaccines are more readily available and don’t need the cold-chain logistics of the Pfizer and Moderna shots.

While the Chinese vaccines reportedly have a much longer shelf life than the Western shots, all vaccines expire rather quickly. And they’re not free, except for a gift of 500,000 doses from Uncle Xi.

Galvez, under fire for the secrecy surrounding the deal, says the price of the Sinovac shot will be reasonable. Even if Sinovac can match the no-profit, no-loss price of AstraZeneca, however, our great-great grandchildren are already deep in debt so we can pay for these vaccines. We can’t afford any waste, the way vaccine hesitancy in America is leading to the waste of thousands of US-made vaccines.

Officials of the Duterte administration, which has embraced everything Chinese including the Wuhan virus at the start of the pandemic, must set the example in accepting the China-made vaccines.

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Microbiologist Fr. Nicanor Austriaco of the OCTA Research team has a blunt suggestion: President Duterte should lead the way like other heads of government, and get his Sinovac shot – in the arm, and in public.

Father Nic says Duterte is a president, not a queen, so he shouldn’t liken himself to English royalty who opted to get their shots in private (but surely not in the butt).

As I have written, Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also got the Sinovac shot in public to kick off their nationwide vaccination programs.

The Sinovac jab has no peer-reviewed efficacy rate, but what has been reported is 50.4 percent – the lowest, but within the threshold set by the WHO for clinical trials.

Father Nic says that because of the urgency of developing COVID immunity, it’s OK to receive a vaccine with only 50.4 percent efficacy now, and just get another shot months later when the jabs with higher efficacy become more readily available.

With some degree of protection, we can resume activities that have been on hold since the start of the pandemic. Travel can be revived; restaurants, malls and entertainment centers can come back to life.

Health experts have stressed that COVID health protocols will have to remain in place even when immunization starts. As we are seeing in countries where vaccination is now underway, the coronavirus doesn’t take a break, and now it has more infectious mutations. If we ease up on the health protocols, a fresh surge of infections could lead us back to stringent lockdowns.

President Duterte summed up our situation: the economy “is in bad shape” and is “sinking deeper and deeper.”

Vaccination is the key to recovery – if people will go along with it.

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Father Nic himself, following his recent return to Rhode Island where he teaches biology and theology at Providence College, has received his first dose of the Moderna vaccine together with other members of the Dominican order.

They didn’t jump the queue; their turn at inoculation is part of a phased rollout of the US vaccination program.

After getting his shot, Father Nic said he felt unusual fatigue and suffered chills, but all reactions passed after he had slept for six hours straight. As of Wednesday morning (US time) when we interviewed him, he was already feeling fine. There were also no serious adverse reactions reported among the other Dominicans. So Father Nic is looking forward to his second dose.

Several members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines have said they are willing to be inoculated in public to help overcome vaccine hesitancy. We don’t know if the willingness would be there if it’s the Sinovac shot.

A survey involving 15,000 respondents conducted by the University of Santo Tomas, where Father Nic leads the COVA Vaccine Awareness Team, showed 80 percent being open to vaccines, but only 50 percent ready to be inoculated against COVID especially if the shots are made in China.

Similar results emerged in informal surveys and consultations conducted by certain local governments in the National Capital Region. Physicians we have interviewed said there is a similar sentiment within the medical community. Being the epicenter of the pandemic, overcoming vaccine hesitancy is all the more urgent in the NCR.

Father Nic says politicians will have to take the lead in promoting vaccine confidence. In the UST survey, 71 percent of the respondents said they would be willing to be vaccinated if politicians led the way.

While everyone has a right to refuse vaccination and be choosy about the shot, Father Nic is also correct: the president of the republic is not just everyone. As leader, Duterte must set the example. He must use his immense popularity to overcome Filipinos’ hesitancy to vaccines – specifically, to vaccines made in China.