More aggressive vaccine rollout in key cities pushed

CEBU, Philippines —The National Task Force Against COVID-19 is pushing for a more aggressive vaccine rollout in key cities to reach a daily jab rate of 1.5 million in the last quarter of this year.

NTF chief implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito G. Galvez, Jr., in a meeting with local chief executives, said that their goal is for the local government units to inoculate 70 percent of their eligible population with at least one dose by November.

“We cannot scale up our national vaccination output if we just settle with our current jab rate,” said Galvez.

The NTF identified highly urbanized cities and regions that would take the lead in pushing the country’s daily vaccination output to 1.5 million doses following the influx of vaccine supplies from various manufacturers and the opening of the vaccine rollout to the general population including minors.

“With the steady arrival of bigger COVID-19 vaccine shipments, our LGUs must work double-time to realize President Rodrigo Duterte’s directive, and that is, to continue to ramp up their vaccination rollout,” Galvez said.

“Nagpla-plateau tayo noong mga nakaraang araw to just 400,000 to 500,000 jabs daily. If this will continue, hindi natin makukuha ang 50 million [fully vaccinated individuals] by year-end,” added Galvez.

Along with this, NTF is also looking at using the ‘Vax to the Max’ vaccination strategy to boost the country’s COVID-19 inoculation program. Here, LGUs are given a go to inoculate all individuals interested as soon as possible.

As this strategy will be used, LGUs do not need to purchase their own COVID-19 vaccines since the country now has a sufficient supply in stockpile accordingly.

“The country has been receiving an average of 1 million COVID-19 vaccines daily since the start of October. And once we receive them, they are immediately deployed to LGUs and other implementing units throughout the country. There is no time wasted,” Galvez said.

Cebu, for one, got an additional supply of 101,790 doses of Pfizer vaccine out of the 1,016,730 doses of the government-procured COVID-19 jabs from the American manufacturer that arrived on Friday.

“As you know we [American government] have been cooperating with stakeholders in the Philippines since the start of the pandemic to try to address and alleviate the suffering caused by the pandemic,” Edward Vincent O’Bryan, political councilor of US Embassy said during an interview following the arrival of the vaccines. — GMR (FREEMAN)