`…I will concede that we have made good strides in so short a period of time. But good is not good enough.’
BY any measure, deploying 40 million vaccine doses within one year’s time IS an accomplishment. And that has what has been achieved in the Philippines since we began vaccinating the first Filipino against the COVID-19 virus.
I just can’t resist: I am not so sure if the PSG and all the others who received Sinopharm shots late last year are counted in this DOH-released number (I doubt if they are) and so the “honor” of being the first Filipino to have received a COVID jab will go to someone else.
Who he or she is, we don’t know.
But ever since the “official” vaccination program began, the DOH put the total number of doses injected into Filipinos at 40 million. If we take this number as 99.99% to be of the two-dose vaccine variety, then that’s the equivalent of 20 million Filipinos fully vaccinated.
That’s 1/5, more or less, of our total population. Achieved in less than 10 months. Now we just have to focus on 4/5 more.
But the vaccines (mainly Sinovac/Covavax from China) are coming. And in greater numbers and frequency much higher than those in the first half of the year. Which is a welcome development because we are in a race against time, trying to provide vaccine-induced immunity to as many people as possible before they get infection-induced immunity. Which they get, provided, of course, they don’t succumb to COVID – thankfully still only a small percentage of the total population although every death hurts. Every one.
Again and again and again I say we need to look at the COVID vaccination program through the lenses that see the glass half empty rather than half full. Why? Because every day that passes leaves millions vulnerable, and when you have millions vulnerable to a highly contagious virus, then your infection rates and hospitalization rates and casualty rates go up.
Not to mention the likelihood of the virus mutating again and again and again.
Against a contagious enemy we cannot be complacent. And lest I risk my friend Harry Roque pounding on my work table, I will concede that we have made good strides in so short a period of time. But good is not good enough.
With 40 million doses in (hypothetically) the arms of 20 million Filipinos, we just have to find 120 million doses more to jab into the arms of 60 million more Filipinos. This will give us a fighting chance of keeping the virus at bay, in the process opening up the economy more and allowing more people to again earn a living. If what I read was accurate, we should expect at least 20 million more doses arriving before the end of September (good for 10 million more Filipinos) and, it is hoped, as much as 50 million more doses by October.
Now if we can get our hands on 50 million doses every month for the last three months of 2021, then we would have achieved what I had thought the unachievable.
I am one of the lucky 20 million, having had two Moderna jabs up my left arm. I am also one of the lucky ones to survive a nasty bout with COVID, which thus makes me doubly lucky. And while infection numbers are still high and more and more of my friends seem to be coming down with the virus, they, too, count among the lucky ones because they had been previously jabbed and their jabs are what are saving them from suffering the worst cases of COVID. They’ve mostly been mild cases that one can manage at home with the proper treatment.
This is why we need to get those numbers going higher and higher per day. Thank God we have dispensed with 40 million but let’s dispense with the next 40 in half the time we did the first. And the next 40 again after that. And so on until we hit maybe 80 million fully vaccinated Filipinos. (Hopefully before we go to the polls.)
Then and only then can we relax even more. But not a moment too soon. Far too many are still getting infected and many are still turning serious, even dying.
40 million doses is good. Now let’s go get the 120 million more.
