V-Day

V-Day is Vaccine Day, but it won’t fall on Valentine’s Day, according to the Department of Health.

V-Day, when the vaccines arrive, may not yet be Vaccination Day, unless the shots are transported straight to a COVID referral hospital where the first batch of health frontliners can finally get their jabs.

Thanks to the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility for developing countries like ours, we’re assured of 44 million doses of vaccines that have already been vetted by the world’s SRAs or stringent regulatory authorities.

Some 9.2 million doses are expected to arrive by March and April, according to WHO country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe. And the initial batch will be arriving this month, although the figures vary, from the 117,000 doses announced by the Department of Health up to one million. What we’re assured of is that the vaccines are from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, although Oxford-AstraZeneca has also been mentioned by the British embassy.

Even a million is a long way from the 10 million Pfizer doses that we were supposed to have received last month, worked out by the Department of Foreign Affairs with the US State Department. But no use crying over spilled milk (or a ball that slipped through butterfingers).

Another piece of good news: the first foreign company to get approval for late-stage clinical trials of its COVID vaccine in the Philippines will be starting the test possibly this week, and it’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the Belgian arm of US multinational giant Johnson & Johnson.

Being prone to severe allergies, I am inclined to wait for the Janssen shot to be available here. It requires only a single dose so I risk anaphylaxis only once.

Now that it looks certain that the first vaccines to be rolled out in our country will be the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna jabs (and possibly AstraZeneca / Oxford), our problem could shift from vaccine hesitancy to jumping the inoculation queue.

There could be a spike in the number of politicians and other public officials offering to take their shots in public (together with their entire household, if possible) to overcome vaccine hesitancy.

They should be reminded that the hesitancy, as manifested in surveys and informal consultations done by local governments and research groups, is specifically toward vaccines made in China.

*      *      *

We still need role models who will take the Chinese-made vaccines in public once the shots arrive.

And there is no doubt that they will still arrive; our government continues to negotiate with the Chinese vaccine makers, with strict confidentiality of course.

Even if we have been assured of 44 million Western vaccine doses under the COVAX Facility, that’s good for only 22 million people. We need to vaccinate at least 70 million people to achieve herd immunity. So we need 96 million additional doses. I don’t think Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca can supply all of those shots within the first three quarters of the year.

We may source vaccines from Janssen as well as US biotech firm Novavax, whose COVID vaccine has shown 89.3 percent efficacy. But again, supply availability is a problem as the world scrambles for vaccines. Everyone wants to finish vaccination programs ASAP so public health can improve and economic recovery can start.

Pressed for readily available supplies, with less stringent logistics requirements, the government will consider the vaccines made in China.

*      *      *

Chinese drug makers Sinovac and Clover Biopharmaceuticals are also set to conduct clinical trials in the Philippines, within this month or in March. Filipinos’ aversion to Chinese vaccines, which will be paid for with public funds, could lead to wastage – something we can’t afford.

The government can launch an information campaign on the Chinese jabs. Pinoy resistance to the vaccines, however, runs deeper than insufficient or wrong information.

If the government wants to minimize its headache, it can instead negotiate for a substantial supply of the COVID vaccine made by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute. Unlike the Chinese, the Russians submitted their Sputnik V for peer review. And now the respected medical journal The Lancet has published a peer-reviewed study showing that the Russian vaccine has a high 91.6 percent efficacy.

This is where President Duterte’s admiration for his “idol” Vladimir Putin might come in useful.

*      *      *

While waiting for our vaccine shots, it’s intriguing that COVID trackers are reporting a drop in global cases since the start of the year.

We have also seen this in our country: the post-holiday surge thankfully didn’t materialize. The Black Nazarene gathering also did not turn into a coronavirus super spreader as feared, leading Catholic Church leaders to urge the government to allow more people inside churches.

There is increasing – and hopeful – speculation that like the influenza pestilence that infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 50 million from February 1918 to April 1920 (85,000 in the Philippines), and the SARS epidemic in 2003, COVID-19 is weakening and is on its way to disappearing.

The 1918 pandemic, also called the Spanish flu, was caused by the A/H1N1 virus, and there was no vaccine or cure. Epidemiologists say it ended only when people worldwide were either dead or had survived the infection and developed immunity.

Before COVID-19, Filipinos seemed to be remarkably resistant to viruses. In 2003 when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome spread from southern China to 26 countries, 8,000 people were infected, but we recorded only 14 SARS cases, with two deaths.

H1N1 or swine flu, which began in the US in 2009, infected an estimated 700 million to 1.4 billion people worldwide and killed 203,000. But in our country, only 2,668 cases including three deaths were recorded.

There was a vaccine for swine flu. But there is still no vaccine for SARS, or for that matter AIDS/HIV and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS.

Even while waiting for a vaccine for COVID, transmission has flattened in the disease epicenter, Metro Manila, according to the OCTA Research group. But there are more infectious variants, with the one first detected in Britain now spreading mostly in Bontoc.

The original coronavirus isn’t resting. Last week a senior I know in Metro Manila lost her husband to COVID. He began coughing and having trouble breathing so he was taken to a hospital. In three days he was dead.

If we’re not careful, things can still get worse before vaccines make things better.