EDITORIAL - Luxury product

The Department of Health is urging the public to get COVID booster and bivalent shots. The DOH should first make sure the vaccines are available. With just 390,000 doses of the Pfizer bivalent shot available, several centers administering COVID vaccines in Metro Manila have reported running out of the jabs. Even people seeking their second Pfizer booster have been disappointed.

The 390,000 bivalent doses were donated by Lithuania. When the vaccines arrived back in June, the DOH had said the government would obtain another two million bivalent shots through the COVAX Facility, which can be distributed for free. There are reports that booster take-up slowed down not simply because of vaccine fatigue, but because Filipinos were waiting for the bivalent jabs, which are effective against both the original SARS-CoV-2 and the newest Omicron strains.

Whether the government is still actively pursuing the bivalent vaccine donations through the COVAX Facility is unclear. With the government declaring the COVID state of public health emergency over nationwide, access to free vaccines has become uncertain. Instead the government appears to be relying mainly on people to buy the vaccine once it becomes commercially available.

When the donations from Lithuania were finally rolled out in the Philippines on June 21, the COVID vaccine priority protocols were followed, starting with healthcare workers and their immediate families along with senior citizens. By the time those with comorbidities were allowed to take the shots, the 390,000 doses must have already been nearly depleted.

Last year, Pfizer had said it would charge a commercial price of $110 to $130 per dose in the US for its COVID bivalent vaccine Comirnaty, which the pharmaceutical giant developed together with German firm BioNTech. At yesterday’s exchange rate, that’s more than P6,170 to P7,290 per dose.

There are people in this country who can afford the commercial prices cited by Pfizer, but there are many more, including those in the vulnerable groups, for whom the bivalent jabs will be a luxury beyond their reach. Any commercial rollout will also be through the pharmacy chains, which must meet the special storage requirements of the Pfizer vaccine at minus 70 degrees Celsius.

This storage requirement is believed to be the reason why there has been no application so far for market authorization to sell the vaccine, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s grant of a five-year certificate of product registration for Pfizer’s Comirnaty Original. Only the DOH and certain local government units currently have the required cold chain facilities for the Pfizer jabs. If the DOH wants greater COVID vaccine uptake, it should focus on procuring more bivalent donations.