‘We exhort all Filipinos to support the NVD catch-up plan of intensifying the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, especially now that the new Omicron variant from South Africa is posing a renewed threat to the world.’
ALTHOUGH the target has been lowered, the government is still on the right track in launching today the first three-day National Vaccination Day (NVD) also called “Bayanihan, Bakunahan.”
It is a pragmatic move to prune the target of 15 million vaccine doses to 9 million, considering the various problems of logistics and lack of syringes during the ramped-up vaccination days from November 29 to December 1. The organizers were alerted on the “shortage in ancillary supplies, particularly syringes for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and other logistical challenges.”
Adjustments in the inoculation drive had to be made “following a series of consultations with local chief executives across the country, including our resource management and logistics team,” said a statement on Saturday by the National COVID-19 Vaccination Operations Center and its mother unit, the National Task Force Against COVID-19.
The usual nitpickers and critics of the Duterte administration will surely make a big deal about the decrease in target jabs, but this was explained convincingly by the national task force. Also, injecting 3 million jabs a day is no mean feat, and there is no sense in setting a target that cannot be met.
The task force said that while the Department of Health (DOH) has already anticipated the volume requirement for syringes specifically intended for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, the scheduled shipment of the procured supplies made through the United Nations Children’s Fund has been delayed due to the current global shortage of syringes.
We note that syringes have specifications and there is a current shortage in the special syringe used to inject 0.3 milliliter per dose of the mRNA vaccine produced by Pfizer and Moderna.
The government has expressed concern that 74 million Filipinos are still unvaccinated, while the total COVID-19 vaccines that have been delivered to the Philippines since last February is 140 million doses.
Pfizer shipments have totaled 36.6 million doses, the second largest after the 54 million CoronaVac doses from Sinovac Biotech of China. AstraZeneca comes third with 20.3 million doses, and Moderna, fourth, with 14.6 million doses.
We exhort all Filipinos to support the NVD catch-up plan of intensifying the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, especially now that the new Omicron variant from South Africa is posing a renewed threat to the world.
