Stumbling towards Christmas

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‘It is not going to be the happy Christmas we were promised. At least not for majority of our people. For many reasons, our government has been stumbling from Day One in its efforts to address the threat of COVID-19.’

IT’S the end of July and we are about to enter the last non-ber month of the year. If you think Christmas is still a world away, think again: when I was having a trim yesterday evening at Bruno’s SM Aura, it was a Christmas carol that was playing.

Imagine that.

If you take our leaders seriously — though yes, I know at times that is quite a difficult thing to do — then you should know that time and time and time again our vaccine czar, Sec. Carlito Galvez Jr., has assured us that we will have a happy Christmas. Let’s give him a break and don’t even ask “what year?” Because we know he was talking about 2021. This promise was made as early as last March when he also promised that we would be having 500,000 vaccinations a day, every day, by April-May and about one million a day, every day, by June or July.

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Guess what: we got 600,000 jabs for one day, a few days ago. But it was not a daily record for a sustained period of time. It was a number hit on a certain day- the 27th of the month, I think. Now, in order to make the whole July average 600,000 jabs a day, how many jabs have to be delivered for the 28th, 29th, 30th and 31st?

The problem first and foremost is vaccine supply. It is a fact that the doses are coming in trickles. Yes, trickles. Think about it: when we celebrate the arrival of, say, one million Sinovac doses, we are in effect welcoming the doses that would cover 500,000 of our countrymen. That’s a whole lot of people — enough to fill 20 Araneta Coliseums, I think.

But we need doses not for 500,000 people or 5,000,000, not even for 50,000,000. We need doses for at least 75,000,000 and some would even put that at 95,000,000 because the Delta variant is highly infectious; 500,000 is just about half of 1% of that.

So, when we are told that some 13,000,000 doses have already been jammed into the arms of Filipinos with some 5,000,000 being fully vaccinated, it is reason to rejoice — for the individuals involved. But for the country? With an overwhelming majority still not even having one jab to their name, the country is a petri-dish for virus multiplication and (worse) mutation. And when this happens even those fully jabbed are at risk.

Assuming you solve the issue of vaccine supply by getting China to sell us on sweetheart terms 180 million doses more of Sinovac you then face a second problem — how long the vaccines will hold up against COVID-19 and its new variants. Study after study seem to show that the Western vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and J&J) hold up well against Delta, apparently in that order. But there is no good scientific data to show how well Sinovac adds up. All we have are stories of what other Sinovacced countries are doing — which is to take a different vaccine as a second dose for those who had taken the Chinese vaccine as a first dose. If it is true that Sinovac is not as effective against COVID-19 and its variants as are the others, then we need to brace because most of our people have nothing but Sinovac up their sleeves.

Can a booster jab be given them by end year?

Which brings us to a third issue: costs. If indeed we are ordering the China vaccines in the millions even at sweetheart prices, and if these vaccines need a booster jab because they aren’t as good as the others — who will pay for the booster jab for millions of Filipinos? For sure the expectation will be that the public will get this for free as it got the first two for free. But does government intend to do just that? Will it dare frustrate people not only during the Christmas season, but so close to national elections?

It is not going to be the happy Christmas we were promised. At least not for majority of our people. For many reasons, our government has been stumbling from Day One in its efforts to address the threat of COVID-19.

And so how can we expect anything different on our way to the promised happy Christmas?

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