WORKERS from 13 groups identified as essential personnel, including transport workers and market vendors, are next in line for vaccination against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as part of the A4 category in the immunization priority list.
The 13 sub-groups under A4 have “high levels of interaction with or exposure to the public,” said Undersecretary Rosemarie Edillon of the National Economic and Development Authority.
“They are exposed to different sectors, unlike those working in the offices who can actually maintain a bubble,” she said in a briefing.
At the top of the priority list (A1 to A3) are healthcare workers, senior citizens, and people with comorbidities, who are now undergoing vaccination. Under A5 are poor Filipinos included in the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction.
The 13 sub-groups are:
* Commuter transport (land, air, and sea), including logistics.
* Frontline government workers in justice, security, transport, and social protection sectors.
* Public and private wet and dry market vendors, frontline workers in grocery, supermarkets delivery services.
* Workers in manufacturing for food, beverage, medical, and pharmaceutical products.
* Frontline workers in food retail, including food service delivery.
* Frontline government workers (including safety inspectors, field enumerators, tax and clearance personnel)
* Frontline workers in financial services (including frontliners in banks, money remittance establishments)
* Teaching and related personnel in medical and allied medical courses of higher education institutions, including personnel handling laboratories.
* Frontline workers in hotels and accommodation (especially establishments doubling as quarantine facilities)
* Priests, pastors, religious leaders regardless of denomination
* Construction workers in government infrastructure projects
* Security guards/personnel assigned in the establishments, offices, agencies, and organizations identified in the priority sectors.
* Overseas Filipino workers scheduled for deployment within two months
With the priority sectors under A4 now identified, the Department of Health asked companies involved to prepare a list their employees.
“Have your respective master list already for the A4. This is just to ensure that we are really vaccinating those who are really belonging to A4 priority list,” said Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire.
Vergeire said members of the media are not among those included in the A4 sector.
“The media would be part of the B classification together with the other workers in our society,” she said.
Edillon urged media men to ask the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) to include them in the A4 sector.
She said the IATF has the final say on who would be included in the list.
The vaccination drive started on March 1. The country has a supply of 3.25 million doses of vaccines from the Chinese firm Sinovac Biotech and British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca Plc.
Both are given in two doses per person.
At least one million individuals have received a first dose and 132,228 persons, the second dose as of April 11, according to presidential spokesman Harry Roque.
Roque also said that in Asia, the Philippines ranks third in terms of number of administered vaccines. Among ASEAN countries, Indonesia ranks first with 14.7 million vaccine doses administered, followed by Singapore at 1.7 million, and the Philippines with 1.1 million, he said.
On Sinovac, Roque said the important thing is that it provides some protection against COVID-19.
He said Gao Fu, head of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has clarified his statement about the efficacy of Sinovac.
The efficacy of Sinovac’s CoronaVac is just slightly above the 50 percent effectiveness threshold set by the World Health Organization.
Gao, in a conference in the Chinese city of Chengdu on Saturday, said China is formally considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines as a way of further boosting vaccine efficacy.
Available data shows Chinese vaccines lag behind others including Pfizer and Moderna in terms of efficacy, but require less stringent temperature controls during storage.
Giving people doses of different vaccines is one way to improve vaccines that “don’t have very high rates of protection,” Gao said, without specifying whether he was referring to foreign or domestic vaccines.
Gao also rejected claims by some media reports that he said Chinese COVID-19 vaccines have a low protection rate, telling Global Times that it was “a complete misunderstanding.” — With Jocelyn Montemayor and Reuters
